HN has gone completely off the rails. See my comment above. It's been like this for more than a year now. This sort of outright racist hate speech is now completely normal on HN and is eagerly embraced.
1. None of those links provide anything like evidence or support of your accusations.
2. It's absolutely remarkable that Huawei had somehow committed all these crimes and yet nobody has ever managed to prove anything significant in a court of law.
All we get are wild accusations and law suits that get thrown out.
Here's the really remarkable aspect here: the US government doesn't need to actually force propaganda on its citizens. If there's one thing we can learn very clearly from this entire ridiculous episode it is that American citizens and the American media will happily propagandize themselves. They will eagerly believe the most far fetched claims without a shred of proof, despite all actual evidence to the contrary, and they will spread those claims to each other in a kind of extremely intense decentralized disinformation machine. There's nothing else like this in the planet. You would think after Iraq Americans would learn even the tiniest bit of skepticism... But no.
I won't even bother pointing out any more how HN has devolved into a 24/7 racist anti-China Two Minute Hate system. At this point it's beyond clear that the community has abandoned any kind integrity. I don't think there's anything to be done which is why I'I've left and had to go through the embarrassing exercise if unrecommending the site to people I've previously recommended it to. People will say this is just a phase but I doubt it. When a community abandons any kind of Truth standard and just embraces bullshit I don't think it recovers.
Yeah, this kind of blind racism and ignorance of what's actually happening in China is always a bit shocking. A lot of people are going to look back on the US from 2001 to 2030 and ask themselves how people be so totally blind and stupid. It's going to be one of those monumental historical blunders that will never really be lived down.
> In what free market does a government subsidize a company
The idea that the Chinese government subsidizes every Chinese company is nonsense. This is just something that Americans need to believe because they don't want to admit how extraordinarily inefficient their domestic industries were before 2000.
> and force competitors to give their native companies their IP to do business?
This is hilarious. Nobody forces foreign companies to give away their IP. These companies, which are supposedly the best in the world, analyze the trade and make it voluntarily or walk away. It's called the free market. Remember that?
> What happens in 20 years when China has complete dominance of the solar market
The irony here is that all the tariffs do is put America further and further behind. The tariffs don't help America at all eg [1]. This should be obvious to anybody who understands how solar works and knows that the real money is not in panel printing.
This rhetorical maneuver, where you simply declare a system you don't understand to be totalitarian is no different from shouting Nazi at anything you don't agree with. Even a cursory analysis would show that the defining characteristic of totalitarianism, "absolute control over public and private life," doesn't apply to a system where people are completely free to travel anywhere whenever they want and the government invests hundreds of billions to encourage this free travel both within the country and abroad for its citizens.
Sure. In a thread absolutely full of baseless rants my comment, which does provide an explanation and a link, was the one that jumped out you.
Though it is aways interesting to see people like you can rationalize your censorious actions. It's too bad HN doesn't require a text explanation for downvoting. It wouldn't decrease the hypocrisy but it would provide some further insight into the hypocrisy.
Hilarious. I wasn't even done with the comment and it's already being rapidly downvoted. The total lack of intellectual integrity on HN is a sight to behold. It's really funny to watch the advocates of free speech and discussion rapidly downvote anything that contradicts their ideology.
> China is unique in that it's been all about oppressing and abusing the population as heavily as possible, without pause, ever since the first emperors gave the country its foreign name.
This is such complete nonsense. I think it's hilarious how totally and completely misguided about China that Westerners, and Americans in particular, actually are. It boggles the belief just how much complete nonsense is spouted here on reddit and in the Western press. This is the very essence of people being disconnected from reality and constructing a new reality in accordance with their ideology.
Reality check: go to China and actually talk to the Chinese themselves. Radical idea! Social credit is extremely popular in China [1]. The social credit system is also not new. Anybody who understands how Chinese society has always worked would understand that this is the application of new technology to ideas that are nearly three thousand years old.
> At the end of the day, you have a company with strong links (down to its founder) to the military
This sort of pure propaganda just undermines your case. The founder of Huawei was never more than a low level engineer in the military, was forbidden from joining the CCP for many years [1].
This isn't really about spying. The reality is that Huawei's equipment is the best in the world for the money. It's not even close. Given a free market (remember that?) there's really no doubt that Huawei will go on to completely dominate this market over the next decade. It's already the largest telecom equipment maker in the world [1] and its size only makes its products and architects more and more competitive with each day. It's a virtuous cycle at work that nobody can deny anymore. The numbers don't lie: what you have here is a technologically sophisticated market where the West cannot compete with China at all. This is supposed to be impossible!
Now there is a legitimate national security concern about having the world's telecom equipment manufactured by a single company. But there's only so much can do under existing trade treaties. It's also really not a good look for the US and the West to be seen actively trying to disrupt the free market at work. And so we get this concocted story about spying. It's concocted because nobody, despite spending millions and millions of dollars investigating Huawei and studying its boxes, has ever shown the company participating in anything like espionage. Most people can see through this blatant protectionist hypocrisy [2]. Ironically all the security research on Huawei has only served to make their products much more secure than the competition.
If you think that demonstrates a legitimate security concern then every telecom manufacturer is a security concern. Spend some time comparing the known security issues with Huawei routers to Cisco's routers for example.
No, there's absolutely no evidence that Huawei equipment is a legitmate security concern. In fact it's just the opposite. Huawei equipment has been extensively and continuously studied by the best security researchers in the world. Britain, alone, spent roughly $25 million dollars going over all Huawei equipment with a fine tooth comb and their "big conclusion" was that they can only offer "limited assurances" of Huawei equipment [1]. USA and France and Germany and Brazil have also extensively analyzed Huawei equipment and come up with nothing. Ironically, as the discussion in India and Japan and the Phillipines now show, the Western obsession with Huawei and has only made the case for Huawei's equipment much, much stronger.
Ah, I see, the endless diarrhea of anti-China propaganda is totally deserved because it's China is untrustworthy. And how can China dare demand access to IP, they're Chinese, their job is just to be dumb cheap labor right?
What is really striking about the logic at work here is that you see the exact same thing happening in the most authoritarian countries. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, and America. The media pumps out the same endless propaganda designating some external entity. The same idiots lap it up and whip themselves into a frenzy in daily two minute hate sessions. The same paranoia, the same hatred, the same fear.
As I said before, we've reached the point where this sort of behavior is practiced openly and without shame. This is key. This story was quickly voted to the top of HN and the comments are full of similar nonsense or defenders of the nonsense. That says it all but, ironically, there's not much else to be said because you really think China is the problem here and there's no rational discussion to be had with such committed ideologues.
This is pure bullshit. The idea that Chinese companies and the government are somehow fused has no basis in reality. But it's remarkable to watch people push this sort of conspiracy theory. The exact same people will, when the government cracks down on a company like Tencent, go on to claim that companies are victims of the government.
At this point there's so much blatant China panic and propaganda that it's descended into farce. Look at this thread. We've now reached the point where the less evidence behind some baseless anti-China claim (an unecrypted file airport_china.txt!!!111!) the more it will be seized upon and quickly up-voted. The people pushing this don't have any integrity at all and if you call out the total lack of integrity they will just take that as further validation of their paranoid fantasies.
> I think a more plausible explanation is status envy.
Elon Musk could announce the cure for cancer tomorrow and many would decry it as a "PR Stunt." Philosophers deploy the term "ressentiment" [1] to describe this complex behavior. This isn't exactly because they fear their own particular status falling, though that might've been the initial origin, by the time it reaches this stage you're talking about a cultural phenomenon, a "morality." Real "anti-social punishment" must occur because these people feel confident that others will not blame them for their anti-social behavior, indeed they likely believe that others will actually praise them for their anti-social behavior. It's misguided then to think this is a personal/economic or "rational" behavior and not an ideological one.
It's not the human mind, it's a particular ideology. What's at work here is an ideology that must find enemies, the more heinous the better, in order to justify its own heinous actions.
The entire story is based off remarks from an anonymous UN official on a random UN committee. [1] In classic style remarks from anonymous and highly partisan sources are repeated endlessly until they "become" true. There's absolutely zero concrete evidence that can be verified.
The deeper point is that Americans are trapped inside a propaganda bubble. Their outlandish understanding of the world is based on nothing more than gossip repeated over and over by their press. It's no better than Russia; the only difference is that most Russians know full well what's going on and are very skeptical of such claims.
On a deeper level I suspect Americans need to believe this nonsense, that there must be an external enemy to hate. It's not that they are deceived by the media, it's that they want to be deceived.
This is a very common pattern. American media publishes outlandish stories and the only evidence is "anonymous sources" and highly partisan agents. Iraqi soldiers killed babies in incubators. Iraq has 10_000 aluminum tubes. Iran is arresting all its Jews. China has camps with millions of people imprisoned.
The only thing insane about the whole affair is that no matter how many times it happens, virtually every time, Americans are quick to believe these reports and display virtually no skepticism. The problem isn't Bloomberg by any stretch of the imagination.