I don't understand is the false equivalency between baidu's advertising and PRC's notorious human rights violations.
This post doesn't address any of the concerns brought up by the original letter they decry?
Weak arguments are covered up with emotional rhetoric about deaths and such.
Please do not respond to my comment about “what about US Federal agencies in bed with the FANG”. Before we discuss, China is not even on the same ballgame. It’s not the same sport. It’s like going to another planet where your entire identity is linked to your cellphone number. I visit China multiple times a year and without WeChat, I can’t do anything. On HN, I often see comparisons to the US and the west but it’s just shifting the discussion somewhere else. US has democracy, open and fair justice system and I can sue the government, I have Miranda rights, freedom of speech and the whole American dream enchilada. It’s still alive despite of the shit president and it is here to stay. Negativity against the US is rampant here.
Just because you can't stop something, doesn't mean you should actively support it.
It's awfully easy to stand on principle when it's the other guy who sacrifices for it.
Is the other guy me? or are the other guys those killed by the PRC?
You would sacrifice them to search Google, I would sacrifice your Google searches for them. We do not have to agree.
That's not the point. People already DID get killed, and ARE getting killed. Millions and millions of them. Totalitarianism is the fact on the table. That's not just "another market", and the benefit to China gained by Western complicity in it, is nothing compared to the damage we are doing to ourselves.
I doubt you understand how important this is and how deep it runs. We're not going to throw millenia of evolution of thought, and ultimately thought and human agency itself away, just to make not resisting more comfortable for "the large chunk of non-dissidents" or Silicon Valley or whoever may come.
> The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind-manipulation. In the past, free-thinkers and revolutionaries were often the products of the most piously orthodox education. This is not surprising. The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will really work -- with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
> Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.
-- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World Revisited" (1958)
Google employees post letter saying DragonFly enables human rights violations.
OP posts letter saying DragonFly creates an alternative to baidu's fraudulent and dangerous advertising, and that this is a reasonable response to the letter.
It sounds like the op thinks that Baidu's advertising and human rights violations are either related, or somehow interact.