But is that really as hypocritical as you seem to suggest? After all we are, for lack of a better phrase, the good guys. It's not unprincipled to give the good guys more benefit of the doubt.
Based on the account's history I assume that you're trolling HN like you did before. That's not cool—especially on divisive topics, where it has a genuinely destructive effect. I've banned your account until we get an indication that you'll use the site as intended. You're welcome to read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and email us at hn@ycombinator.com if that's what you'd like to do.
And yet, there are bad guys. Churchill was a bastard, and no kind of “good guy” yet Hitler and the Nazis were the bad guys. C‘est la vie. Stalin was one of the bad guys, and so was Slobodan Milosovic, and so is Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Pol Pot, etc. Good guy is a tough category to fill, but history is full of inexcusable monsters and we should be careful with our moral relativism.
Dick Cheney and Tony Blair don't seem to belong in that same list. Not saying they are good guys, but I don't see how they can be even close to on the same level as the others.
But I agree with your main point. There is real evil out there and we have a moral prerogative to stop/fight/kill those people.
The USA is hardly spotless, but they have a good reputation of standing up to real evil in the world.
Chinese here. How do you guys reconcile your own torrenting, usage of sci-hub etc with the tendency to portray us as monsters for "theft of American intellectual property"?
I'm granting that we did (and on a large enough scale) for the sake of argument.
Is the idea that it's okay to steal so long as it's stealing from the rich and powerful (netflix, disney, record labels whatever)? If so, do you see how that argument might be something we can also appeal to?
(I would add "genuinely curious", but I feel it's become a device not for canceling for but for indicating sarcasm, so I won't do it)
I don't think normal Americans would portray you as monsters for this. Of course, the MPAA and RIAA would complain, since it is their business.
There are other types of intellectual property that are much more likely to upset normal Americans. This includes trade secrets, trademarks, and possibly patents. Trade secrets are stolen by hacking, by forcing American companies to give them up in exchange for market access, and by employees who fail to abide by non-disclosure agreements. Trademarks are stolen by simply making clones, or sometimes by unauthorized operation of a legitimate factory in China. For example, I have a USB power adapter marked "SAMSUNG" that clearly isn't made by Samsung. This is very common, and these devices often catch fire or damage the electronics that are attached. Patents can sometimes be an issue, with Chinese companies able to evade enforcement.
When USA was new, we were a bastion of creativity. We didn't acknowledge the Old Country's laws on intellectual property, and we were the better for it. Things were crazy; you did stuff and you didn't let someone else that the thing in your head had ownership by someone else. There was a long period in which our goods were beneath European quality.
Not much time passes, and new and unique things were made here. The regime for patent/copyright protection got just as authoritarian and wicked in protecting 'stuff'. Hollywood was one such case - in which the devices to make movies was patented and the company that made them wanted their cut. The escape to California was to avoid those fees.
Again, China's been playing the same long game. "Rip off others' IP, allow extreme growth by being very liberal with copyright/patent, and eventually playing very protectionist once the economy is stable and advanced". This isn't anything unique with China, or the US, or anyone else.
> How do you guys reconcile your own torrenting,
Because once a country hits the protectionist point, they usually go way overboard and stifle all sorts of things. It pisses people off - is it really piracy if you buy a blu-ray and download it? Is it really piracy if you download a turd film and delete it? There's a lot of edge cases that are called piracy which in reality aren't. It's just called that cause Disney et al have lobbied to call it that.
Also, as I have gotten more money, I have been more willing to pay for media. When I was poorer, I was spending perhaps $10 for a ticket per every 6 months to a movie.
> usage of sci-hub etc
Sci-hup and "academic piracy" is a whole different ballgame. Predatory firms have put paywalls in place that alienate the creators of the papers, the reviewers of the papers, and the academics who use the papers, for $37 a paper. These predatory firms add nothing, and deserve to die. But again, this is completely different than movie/tv/music media.
> with the tendency to portray us as monsters
Humans have a bad tendency to 'otherize' people. See, you're Chinese, and not in my peer group, so my decisions have little effect on you. I can also have a poor opinion of you (having not even know you!) and people in my peer group don't care too much.
And it happens the other way around. Americans (USA) are horrible aggressors and evil empire and bad. Lots of places agree with that. But they don't know me, my friends, or my social groups. And in the end, other people 'otherize' the US, knowing what happens in DC isn't what we're like where we live.
It's best to think of this as "out of sight, out of mind, out of emotion". Because it is all too easy to consider someone else on a different point on this planet as "monsters". Eventually, we'll change that; although I think the internet like here is doing the ground work.
Honestly, the censored stuff is crap anyways. Reading the censored stuff is what leads people to devote their lives to "politics", "activism", and "social justice", and away from the really good stuff such as math, science, and philosophy, which the Chinese government never blocked. Any time spent on the activism stuff is time you are not spending on genuinely meaningful and personally fulfilling pursuits. In a sense, political activity is like playing video games and doing drugs, except more dangerous because you don't tend to feel as guilty for spending a lot of time on it. I think it's a good thing that drugs are generally banned, but there are also such things as "drugs of the mind" such as video games and political agitations and I don't see why reasons for banning the former shouldn't generalize to at least some of the latter
> The type of personal integration we attain – or the effective lack thereof – depends on what possibilities our life situation offers us for the development of autonomy. It is a distorted development that is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings.
> The struggle for autonomy heightens our aliveness. Insofar as the socialization process blocks autonomy, however, this process engenders the evil it attempts to prevent. If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the child’s efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil.
-- Arno Gruen, "The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women"
That's just the art of writing headlines. How else do they generate online conversation except by stating it in a obviously flawed way provoking people like you to point out the flaw and people with a penchant for "charity" to come to their defense, and so on and so forth?
We fall for this because a subset of us has been provoked to point out the obvious flaw in the headline or the summary and another subset has been provoked into defending the part that isn't flawed.
I alternated between feeling like this was a question worth answering and feeling like a dick for answering this with your own words.
English needed spaces because the graphemes are of variable length, so without spacing there is no telling in any quick way where one meaning unit ends and another begins. The idea that Chinese "needs" spacing is a little like a UTF-16 advocate saying "what UTF-32 really needs is surrogate pairs". No, spacing is not some kind of high tech invention by English, it's a necessity that follows from the its special design (also think the use of null characters to terminate strings)
It's also very hard to cancel even by calling. When I cancelled my subscription last year, it wasted twenty minutes of my time even though I was firm throughout. The retaining person at one point even insulted me when I didn't catch something he said and said excuse me could you say that again - his response was to start doing an exaggerated accent of what he assumes to be my race (based on the name).
You mean "at most"? I've noticed an interesting tendency to mix up "at least" and "at most" even though they are opposite in meaning. I've even heard people say at best when they mean at worst
