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This sentiment trivially reduces to, "everything the US does is fine until it's the most oppressive presence on the internet", which probably isn't what you mea

This sentiment trivially reduces to, "everything the US does is fine until it's the most oppressive presence on the internet", which probably isn't what you mean. The US flexes a lot of political muscle to enforce copyright restrictions, maintain secrets, and expand surveillance around the world. That may not be as oppressive as China, but on a scale from "free" to "China", it's still in the "China" half.

toss1 8y ago
Nonsense false equivalency. Yes, in terms of implementing secrets & National Security-related spying there is overall parity, with the US probably a bit ahead of China & Russia. But in terms of being an average citizen, it is night and day. At least for now, the US is an active open democracy, with a large majority of citizens actively engaged in maintaining the governmental and extra-governmental institutions the maintain democracy, e.g., independent judiciary, co-equal branches of govt, elections, independent journalism, free speech, etc. Even though these are imperfectly implemented and under threat by the current administration (w/increasing evidence of significant compromise by Russia), the US remains overly in the OPEN and FREE column. In contrast, China is a straight-up autocracy, and it is openly working to ensure it's citizens do not even know their own history (e.g., Tiananmen, Tibet) or current news (e.g., Uyghurs), and have no capability to independently either obtain accurate information, or to organize to respond appropriately if they can somehow get it. And of course the spyware topic of this article, where ordinary citizens can get stopped on the street for failure to install. This is little different than "May I see your papers please". Russia is not far behind. To falsely equate these regimes and their surveillance & interference levels is tantamount to propaganda.
- adventured 8y ago
  > Even though these are imperfectly implemented and under threat by the current administration The current administration is providing one of the greatest demonstrations in US history of just how different the US is from the Russias and Chinas of the world. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of press, is working well given the intensity of the atmosphere in question. There are routine demonstrations against the administration all over the country, they're not being broken up by thousands of government thugs with clubs and guns, which is what you see in Russia, China and Iran. A solid 90% of all media is entirely stacked against the administration. Celebrities are openly calling for the President to be coup'd, killed, or otherwise just 'taken out.' Even the media has joined in on that at times. The so called deep state (a collection of entrenched, powerful bureaucracies within the government) have been openly acting against the administration at every turn. And come the post mid-terms - which clearly the Democrats are going to retake the house in - there are going to be approximately a thousand investigations. Despite the cynics proclamations, and the current cultural insanity (we've seen it before, the late 1960s and 1970s were far worse), the US system is functioning amazingly well. The current administration has accomplished almost nothing of what it would like to do, and will be a lame duck in a few months. In 2 or 6 years, there will be another administration, and that's that. Life will go on, just as it did after LBJ, Nixon or Bush. There's nothing even remotely comparable to this in Russia or China, and there never has been.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > A solid 90% of all media is entirely stacked against the administration. No, it's not. The leading dedicated TV news network with about 45% of they audience of that media form is completely and unabashedly cheerleading for the Administration, and not even trying to pretend otherwise, as are major outlets in every other form of media. The idea that 90% of the media is hostile to, or even just not overtly shilling for, the Administration would be amusing if it didn't derive directly from the persecution-complex reinforcing propaganda those same media shills use to keep people locked into their propaganda bubble.
    - adventured 8y ago
      In fact it is true. Even the liberal media outlets openly acknowledge this is the case, they're not hiding their bias in any manner, they're openly "resisting." The well-known Pew study in the first year of his administration showed that the negative media coverage was 3x that vs the Obama Admin. The positive coverage was 1/5 that of what the Obama Admin saw. It has only gotten worse since then. "News Coverage Of Trump More Negative Than For Other Presidents" https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/555092743/study-news-coverage-of-trump-more-negative-than-for-other-presidents https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/555092743/study-news-coverage... MSNBC, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, NPR, all talk-show hosts, nearly all journalists (roughly 9 out of 10 vote Democrat to begin with), nearly all celebrities, essentially all of Hollywood - these groups are all as close to universally against Trump as you can get. It's not subtle, it's nearly all-encompassing. Estimating that 90% of media is stacked against the Trump Administration is an understatement.
      - 07d046 8y ago
        That looks like you want presidents to be graded on a curve. Maybe more negative articles have been written about Trump because he's governing in a negative, divisive, chaotic manner and there are countless of examples where he lies or behaves badly that warrant negative coverage.
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  There are interesting discussions to be had about the similarities and differences between China and the US, but saying that "the US is an oppressive presence on the internet" is not without merit. All that is left is disagreement on the relative impacts. The reasonable people who make that argument are also the important vocal watchdogs who provide the friction against further abuses of power. They shouldn't be casually dismissed just because there are worse governments in the world.
  - toss1 8y ago
    No, it is not merely a difference in degree. It is a wholesale difference in kind/type. NatSec ops constrained by a robust constitution implemented by an elected govt, with different co-equal branches, including a court system with centuries of experience & tradition of protecting privacy of citizens from the beginning -- one of the principles on which is was founded (see 2nd, 3rd, 4th, Ammendments for starters), and a vigorous tradition of free speech and free press is one side. The other is an unelected totalitarian govt with a tradition of actively murdering it's own citizens to consolidate single-party political power, decades (China) or centuries (Russia) of manipulating information to the people, zero free press with active suppression, and active programs in both the civilian and military heirarchy to restrict information and spy on the people. To even remotely equate these systems and the threat they pose to the people is to either 1) deliberately grossly misrepresent the situation, or 2) display profound ignorance of the issues. If you want to recognize that there is a vast difference of type and then go on to discuss how the US might be better about what they do, that can be a fine discussion. But the land of 'they're all the same just different degree' is so far from reality as to render discussion useless.
    - jonathanyc 8y ago
      > NatSec ops constrained by a robust constitution implemented by an elected govt, with different co-equal branches, including a court system with centuries of experience & tradition of protecting privacy of citizens from the beginning -- one of the principles on which is was founded (see 2nd, 3rd, 4th, Ammendments for starters), and a vigorous tradition of free speech and free press is one side. When I think of the FISA court I don’t exactly think of “different co-equal branches, including a court system with centuries of experience & tradition of protecting privacy of citizens from the beginning”. The FISA court is literally a non-adversarial court. I think the US court system is one of the best designed in the world. But please don’t pretend that the well-developed standard court system is anything like the secret and unaccountable national security court system.
jerf 8y ago
"This sentiment trivially reduces to, "everything the US does is fine until it's the most oppressive presence on the internet", " No, it doesn't. It means that people who think the US (or the West or whatever) is somehow uniquely evil have an incorrect view of the world and will have incorrect actions in the future as a result. That the US is screwing up doesn't mean that other places aren't screwing up worse. It also means that it isn't only the US screwing up, so if you start arranging your protests and rhetoric and such based on that theory you're going to get played by people who will quite happily play the part of "good guy" for you right up until they close the trap. It also means you may miss allies in the fight, like this guy. There is no way in which incorrectly thinking that the US is the worst or uniquely bad is a good idea. I believe the US is worse than the HN gestalt thinks it is... but China is absolutely worse. It's a preview of where we're headed if we allow people to convince that we are obligated to hand more and more control over to the government to solve every last possible problem, up to and including hurt feelings.
- GW150914 8y ago
  I like to remind people of shit like this when they claim that the United States government is an "oppressive" presence on the Internet. Not “uniquely evil.” I think if he’d said what you’re shifting the goalposts to, it would have been an unremarkable comment with few if any replies. He didn’t say that though, and what he did say was very clear and didn’t leave wiggle room for the hyperbole you’re trying to inject. The actual quote the person you’re responding to was addressing justifies what they said, insofar as it ...trivially reduces to, "everything the US does is fine until it's the most oppressive presence on the internet". That’s a fair summation of using China as a diversion when people claim that the US is *...An oppressive presence on the internet.” Responding to people who claim that it’s worse than China, or “uniquely evil” is an entirely different conversation no one here was having.
07d046 8y ago
It's not fair to say that the US is close to China in this regard. There are no private or encrypted chat apps available in China. Everybody uses WeChat, which is actively surveilled. It's not uncommon for "private" group chats to be shut down if they talk about sensitive topics. You need a license to run a website inside China. If HN ran inside China, our accounts would be linked to our identities, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Consider also the bigger picture. There is no rule of law in China. That guy who is being forced to install spyware on his phone is probably in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands (and maybe over a million) people have been detained without charge and on no legal basis. Conviction rates are extremely high because trials aren't fair. Lawyers and activists disappear. Torture and forced confessions are common.
- kposehn 8y ago
  > There is no rule of law in China. This is the one sentence that everyone on HN must remember when we get into debates about who is better/worse/trump/xi/etc. In China, you have no rights. There is no recourse. There are no promises made by the state to protect you. This is because of China’s situation where it needs a strong central state to maintain control of the distant provinces and keep from fragmenting, but that is another debate in and of itself. The US has screwed up horribly many times, for sure, and is not perfect. But here and in many other countries you are innocent until proven guilty and have the ability to take the state to court to fight a decision you disagree with or feel is unfair.
  - cirgue 8y ago
    Not only that, but there are significant parts of US jurisprudence that impact people's lives every single day that are the explicit result of citizens winning against the state in court.
    - kposehn 8y ago
      Absolutely - and thanks for pointing that out. There’s the same in the UK, Germany, France and many others too.

toss1 8y ago

Nonsense false equivalency. Yes, in terms of implementing secrets & National Security-related spying there is overall parity, with the US probably a bit ahead of China & Russia. But in terms of being an average citizen, it is night and day. At least for now, the US is an active open democracy, with a large majority of citizens actively engaged in maintaining the governmental and extra-governmental institutions the maintain democracy, e.g., independent judiciary, co-equal branches of govt, elections, independent journalism, free speech, etc. Even though these are imperfectly implemented and under threat by the current administration (w/increasing evidence of significant compromise by Russia), the US remains overly in the OPEN and FREE column. In contrast, China is a straight-up autocracy, and it is openly working to ensure it's citizens do not even know their own history (e.g., Tiananmen, Tibet) or current news (e.g., Uyghurs), and have no capability to independently either obtain accurate information, or to organize to respond appropriately if they can somehow get it. And of course the spyware topic of this article, where ordinary citizens can get stopped on the street for failure to install. This is little different than "May I see your papers please". Russia is not far behind. To falsely equate these regimes and their surveillance & interference levels is tantamount to propaganda.

adventured 8y ago
> Even though these are imperfectly implemented and under threat by the current administration The current administration is providing one of the greatest demonstrations in US history of just how different the US is from the Russias and Chinas of the world. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of press, is working well given the intensity of the atmosphere in question. There are routine demonstrations against the administration all over the country, they're not being broken up by thousands of government thugs with clubs and guns, which is what you see in Russia, China and Iran. A solid 90% of all media is entirely stacked against the administration. Celebrities are openly calling for the President to be coup'd, killed, or otherwise just 'taken out.' Even the media has joined in on that at times. The so called deep state (a collection of entrenched, powerful bureaucracies within the government) have been openly acting against the administration at every turn. And come the post mid-terms - which clearly the Democrats are going to retake the house in - there are going to be approximately a thousand investigations. Despite the cynics proclamations, and the current cultural insanity (we've seen it before, the late 1960s and 1970s were far worse), the US system is functioning amazingly well. The current administration has accomplished almost nothing of what it would like to do, and will be a lame duck in a few months. In 2 or 6 years, there will be another administration, and that's that. Life will go on, just as it did after LBJ, Nixon or Bush. There's nothing even remotely comparable to this in Russia or China, and there never has been.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > A solid 90% of all media is entirely stacked against the administration. No, it's not. The leading dedicated TV news network with about 45% of they audience of that media form is completely and unabashedly cheerleading for the Administration, and not even trying to pretend otherwise, as are major outlets in every other form of media. The idea that 90% of the media is hostile to, or even just not overtly shilling for, the Administration would be amusing if it didn't derive directly from the persecution-complex reinforcing propaganda those same media shills use to keep people locked into their propaganda bubble.
  - adventured 8y ago
    In fact it is true. Even the liberal media outlets openly acknowledge this is the case, they're not hiding their bias in any manner, they're openly "resisting." The well-known Pew study in the first year of his administration showed that the negative media coverage was 3x that vs the Obama Admin. The positive coverage was 1/5 that of what the Obama Admin saw. It has only gotten worse since then. "News Coverage Of Trump More Negative Than For Other Presidents" https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/555092743/study-news-coverage-of-trump-more-negative-than-for-other-presidents https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/555092743/study-news-coverage... MSNBC, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, NPR, all talk-show hosts, nearly all journalists (roughly 9 out of 10 vote Democrat to begin with), nearly all celebrities, essentially all of Hollywood - these groups are all as close to universally against Trump as you can get. It's not subtle, it's nearly all-encompassing. Estimating that 90% of media is stacked against the Trump Administration is an understatement.
    - 07d046 8y ago
      That looks like you want presidents to be graded on a curve. Maybe more negative articles have been written about Trump because he's governing in a negative, divisive, chaotic manner and there are countless of examples where he lies or behaves badly that warrant negative coverage.
thaumaturgy 8y ago
There are interesting discussions to be had about the similarities and differences between China and the US, but saying that "the US is an oppressive presence on the internet" is not without merit. All that is left is disagreement on the relative impacts. The reasonable people who make that argument are also the important vocal watchdogs who provide the friction against further abuses of power. They shouldn't be casually dismissed just because there are worse governments in the world.
- toss1 8y ago
  No, it is not merely a difference in degree. It is a wholesale difference in kind/type. NatSec ops constrained by a robust constitution implemented by an elected govt, with different co-equal branches, including a court system with centuries of experience & tradition of protecting privacy of citizens from the beginning -- one of the principles on which is was founded (see 2nd, 3rd, 4th, Ammendments for starters), and a vigorous tradition of free speech and free press is one side. The other is an unelected totalitarian govt with a tradition of actively murdering it's own citizens to consolidate single-party political power, decades (China) or centuries (Russia) of manipulating information to the people, zero free press with active suppression, and active programs in both the civilian and military heirarchy to restrict information and spy on the people. To even remotely equate these systems and the threat they pose to the people is to either 1) deliberately grossly misrepresent the situation, or 2) display profound ignorance of the issues. If you want to recognize that there is a vast difference of type and then go on to discuss how the US might be better about what they do, that can be a fine discussion. But the land of 'they're all the same just different degree' is so far from reality as to render discussion useless.
  - jonathanyc 8y ago
    > NatSec ops constrained by a robust constitution implemented by an elected govt, with different co-equal branches, including a court system with centuries of experience & tradition of protecting privacy of citizens from the beginning -- one of the principles on which is was founded (see 2nd, 3rd, 4th, Ammendments for starters), and a vigorous tradition of free speech and free press is one side. When I think of the FISA court I don’t exactly think of “different co-equal branches, including a court system with centuries of experience & tradition of protecting privacy of citizens from the beginning”. The FISA court is literally a non-adversarial court. I think the US court system is one of the best designed in the world. But please don’t pretend that the well-developed standard court system is anything like the secret and unaccountable national security court system.

jerf 8y ago

"This sentiment trivially reduces to, "everything the US does is fine until it's the most oppressive presence on the internet", " No, it doesn't. It means that people who think the US (or the West or whatever) is somehow uniquely evil have an incorrect view of the world and will have incorrect actions in the future as a result. That the US is screwing up doesn't mean that other places aren't screwing up worse. It also means that it isn't only the US screwing up, so if you start arranging your protests and rhetoric and such based on that theory you're going to get played by people who will quite happily play the part of "good guy" for you right up until they close the trap. It also means you may miss allies in the fight, like this guy. There is no way in which incorrectly thinking that the US is the worst or uniquely bad is a good idea. I believe the US is worse than the HN gestalt thinks it is... but China is absolutely worse. It's a preview of where we're headed if we allow people to convince that we are obligated to hand more and more control over to the government to solve every last possible problem, up to and including hurt feelings.

GW150914 8y ago
I like to remind people of shit like this when they claim that the United States government is an "oppressive" presence on the Internet. Not “uniquely evil.” I think if he’d said what you’re shifting the goalposts to, it would have been an unremarkable comment with few if any replies. He didn’t say that though, and what he did say was very clear and didn’t leave wiggle room for the hyperbole you’re trying to inject. The actual quote the person you’re responding to was addressing justifies what they said, insofar as it ...trivially reduces to, "everything the US does is fine until it's the most oppressive presence on the internet". That’s a fair summation of using China as a diversion when people claim that the US is *...An oppressive presence on the internet.” Responding to people who claim that it’s worse than China, or “uniquely evil” is an entirely different conversation no one here was having.

07d046 8y ago

It's not fair to say that the US is close to China in this regard. There are no private or encrypted chat apps available in China. Everybody uses WeChat, which is actively surveilled. It's not uncommon for "private" group chats to be shut down if they talk about sensitive topics. You need a license to run a website inside China. If HN ran inside China, our accounts would be linked to our identities, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Consider also the bigger picture. There is no rule of law in China. That guy who is being forced to install spyware on his phone is probably in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands (and maybe over a million) people have been detained without charge and on no legal basis. Conviction rates are extremely high because trials aren't fair. Lawyers and activists disappear. Torture and forced confessions are common.

kposehn 8y ago
> There is no rule of law in China. This is the one sentence that everyone on HN must remember when we get into debates about who is better/worse/trump/xi/etc. In China, you have no rights. There is no recourse. There are no promises made by the state to protect you. This is because of China’s situation where it needs a strong central state to maintain control of the distant provinces and keep from fragmenting, but that is another debate in and of itself. The US has screwed up horribly many times, for sure, and is not perfect. But here and in many other countries you are innocent until proven guilty and have the ability to take the state to court to fight a decision you disagree with or feel is unfair.
- cirgue 8y ago
  Not only that, but there are significant parts of US jurisprudence that impact people's lives every single day that are the explicit result of citizens winning against the state in court.
  - kposehn 8y ago
    Absolutely - and thanks for pointing that out. There’s the same in the UK, Germany, France and many others too.