Hacker News Reader

Comment by stelonix | Hacker News Reader

Those movies are more often than not glorifying such embarrassments, which make them propaganda.

As an analogy for China & the US, you can say one of them is Orwellian while the other is Huxleyan. They're both oppressive, but it's about time to stop pretending only coercion is bad; propaganda is everywhere in american media and it's the same tactic used by autocracies in the 40s: spin everything you do as "us vs them they evil" and dehumanize anything your foes do as "they evil not free genocide". People who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths are the same to dismiss the Iraq war with millions dead; calling it what it was, a genocide, will never even pass by their brains. Double standards.

View on HN

Two that come to mind are The Big Short and The Trial of the Chicago Seven.

Two movies in a rich fabric that give me no confidence in the reality of consequences of bad behaviour that my parents drilled into me since I was born.

Both movies give me the impression that no lessons have been learned by either experience.

Indeed. If I recall correctly, movies which use US Military equipment are often required to work with/be reviewed by the Pentagon:

[0] https://www.defense.gov/News/Inside-DOD/Blog/article/2062735...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-mi...

AFAIK there's no requirement to work with the DoD, but if you want DoD consultants they want a say in the movie.

First, now sure I follow how Orwell glorifies these embarrassments, because I think it's the exact opposite.

Second, the USA/EU is not perfectly innocent wrt to propaganda, but still... it could be much worse.

Subjective comparisons are really useless on a debate eg. "I think USA/EU are bad but China is worse" while someone else will say exactly the opposite. You'll then say "he's blinded by propaganda" and the other side will say the same. If the debate is in a western website, you win, if it's in China, they win. That's a flamewar shitshow, not a debate.

The Orwell/Huxley comparison wrt the way China/America respectively enforce their narrative. China is through crackdown of dissent, coercion, while the US is through propaganda that paints everything America does as righteous, inherently good, altruist, selfless... You only have to look at the output of Hollywood or modern videogames to see such an obvious fact.

Of course, if you're the target of state propaganda, it'll be hard to decouple what you've been fed your whole life as truth from geopolitical interests. Being an outsider I can see the bullshit in both governments, but the one I'm worried about is the one which has been belligerent since I was born and much before that.

Yeah, I mean you're basically saying if someone is so inclined they can approach any question from a perspective of bad faith, and never recognize any merit to a theoretically valid argument. I don't think that problem in general can be solved, even if we eliminated propaganda or otherwise. No one can make anyone agree with someone, even if they're right.

That being said, I can still ask questions and say what I think and see what happens. I'm legitimately open to being wrong, in fact I'd love to be.

Also, I'll just add this briefly, I didn't say anything about China. I just said it could be much worse. That could come from my own people (I'm from the USA).

I believe discourse/debate on the internet are broken. I'll go as far as saying internet forums have failed because they're still text-only, moderation is still upvote/downvote-only and people are not obligated to add citations for what they claim. We're left with finding forums where people are more rational and less biased, which is why I frequent HN.

Still, the problem can be alleviated imo if we level up the way internet forums work.

You and me are doing it right now! Respect and setting a good example at the end of the day I think succeed. I can't prove it, but I take it as a matter of faith I suppose.

O and yeah, you're right, these kinds of issues aren't so much of a problem face to face. Our emotions are like little ASICs that just kind of grease the wheels of social friction. Evolutions... crazy.

There is no way you can truthfully say that the US went to Iraq to murder an ethnicity. Flagged.

I'm still waiting for the incontestable proof China is trying to get rid of Uygurs. No, a known anti-China source such as Adrian Zenz being propped up by adversaries of China does not count. If you have the slightest understanding of discourse, you already know this: you don't get a biased source to report on the subject they're biased about.

If you are not in the US, and you are not in Europe (this article is blocked there) which continent are you on?

It seems unreasonable to require that all bad information about China come from previously neutral sources. Is Zenz an anti-China source because he's "biased", or because he's reached a reasonable evidence-based conclusion that the Chinese government is very bad?

AFAIK there was (still is) huge public backlash after it became apparent that there were no WMDs in Iraq. Ofc you can argue that this reaction was too late and maybe even insincere (since public support was very high in the beginning of the war).

> people who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths

Whoa, some paid CCP propaganda there. How about this: Allow international human rights groups and Western media access to the Uygurh areas? Allow the topic to be discussed openly on the Chinese internet?

Until the CCP does that, it's better advised to just suppress the story. Like it's doing now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com