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You’re missing my point. Digital espionage/cyberintelligence/hacking is a boring standard part of intelligence for ANY country that has the capability. I brou

You’re missing my point. Digital espionage/cyberintelligence/hacking is a boring standard part of intelligence for ANY country that has the capability. I brought up the Snowden stuff only as evidence that the US does it too. The point is not to criticize the US, the point is any country that can do digital espionage, China included, is doing it, simply because no one wants to fall behind in a global arms race. I don’t think that makes China the evil boogie man. And I don’t appreciate the straw manning and condescension. I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
> I don’t think that makes China the evil boogie man. > And I don’t appreciate the straw manning If you have to turn "scrutiny" into "makes it the evil boogie man", that's kind of a giveaway. I would call this the compiler error of online comments, and static typing can catch errors without having to run the program every time. Which doesn't only save you time, but the readers too; starting the program, getting bogus results, freeing memory and writing a bug report takes much more time. > I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument. I don't know what you tried, but going by what's written here, you responded to the criticism of nonchalance with "the problem is that $random_stuff_about_the_US_nobody_denies", as if that refutes said criticism. When there is an article about a disease, wouldn't it make sense to talk about all sorts of other diseases instead, so nobody thinks that disease is "the evil boogie man"? Are comments about US spook stuff also riddled with comments about China or Israel or any other the hundreds of nations, just so nobody gets the impression that "the US is the only country doing this"? Why not simply assume everybody knows these very basic things? It's not like any comments (I saw) imply that they don't, unless you read that into them.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> I don’t think that makes China the evil boogie man. > And I don’t appreciate the straw manning If you have to turn "scrutiny" into "makes it the evil boogie man", that's kind of a giveaway. I would call this the compiler error of online comments, and static typing can catch errors without having to run the program every time. Which doesn't only save you time, but the readers too; starting the program, getting bogus results, freeing memory and writing a bug report takes much more time. > I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument. I don't know what you tried, but going by what's written here, you responded to the criticism of nonchalance with "the problem is that $random_stuff_about_the_US_nobody_denies", as if that refutes said criticism. When there is an article about a disease, wouldn't it make sense to talk about all sorts of other diseases instead, so nobody thinks that disease is "the evil boogie man"? Are comments about US spook stuff also riddled with comments about China or Israel or any other the hundreds of nations, just so nobody gets the impression that "the US is the only country doing this"? Why not simply assume everybody knows these very basic things? It's not like any comments (I saw) imply that they don't, unless you read that into them.