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.
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)
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
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?
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
This is a very dangerous logic because it implies we should be fine with China stealing our intellectual property. The view should be qualified in some way so it doesn't have that consequence. They are our enemies.
That's true, but I think the full name usually has, just as the full names of Beijing Shanghai Tianjin etc contain 市 even though the short names doesn't.
And the short names of England, France, America, Germany, Korea, Thai, and China itself contain 国. This seems to suggest that there was a naming convention initially being followed.
Better examples than country names for illustrating this difference between Chinese and English include disease names (mentioned above), fish names, bird names, tree names, flower names, mountain names, river names …
Chinese in many respects is a more explicit language. Variables are generally required to "wear their types on their names". All the disease names contain the word disease (imagine if we must speak of "rabies disease" and "AIDS disease" as opposed to "rabies" and "AIDS"). Country names in general contain the word country, so you can tell from the name that France (lawful country) is a country whereas Chicago is not - something left implicit in English. (There are exceptions of course)
> Generally I just see it as a big warning sign that the quoter is more interested in winning than learning or getting to the truth of the matter and thus is best ignored.
But,to be fully honest, isn't it what this kind of conversation is about, ultimately speaking? There is a reason it happens mostly in low-stake contexts: dinner tables, casual conversation, comments section. Places where "bullshit pass" is implicitly granted to all participants. If we are not allowed to pick and choose and distort other's meanings then where's the fun and drama in all of this?