> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is this really a political statement?

Was the French Ancient Regime a liberal government letting people choose their lawyers?

Was the French Revolution bloodless?

I'm commenting based on the direct remark made to me recently by one of the admins of this site, after I had also made some ideological/political comments, take it up with them (with the site admins, that is).

Those ellipses are doing so much ideological work for you. Those unspeakable, fantastical horrors cannot even be named. That's how bad China is.

Reality is much more boring. China a place with 1.4 billion normal people and it's amazingly not that much more different than anywhere else. Different enough to where they've prevented widespread death from COVID, but not different enough that they might effectively suppress the ongoing petty bourgeois protest against COVID restrictions in banking in Henan. You're the one stuck in Disneyland, believing in fairytale wonders like "totalitarianism." What exactly do you think happened off-screen to the speechless mass of animals after Scar was assassinated? The ellipses work wonders for Disney, too.

Here you go: one way to complete the previous sentence about what exactly happens to children in China when their parents are arrested.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/15/china-xinjiang-children-...

Much more interesting to follow live stories rather than throw around Adrian Zenz's crumbs years later. Here's the ongoing protest I was referring to, where "shattered lives" is a bruised back or (worse) the imaginary threat of becoming proletarian: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/10/china/china-henan-bank-deposi...

It’s telling that you went from “show me historical precedent” to “history is off limits”.

China's vaccine doesn't work. That's why they continue to lockdown. It's not really more complicated than that.

Why are you responding to me with this?

You invented some weird strawman about how great China is and that's why they need to lockdown (1.2 Billion people or something). I'm pointing out that the reason they're locking down is because their science sucks and as a result the vaccine doesn't work, so Covid is still a thing there when it isn't in the West because we have working vaccines and also a lot of people with natural immunity.

Oh. Well more people died of COVID in the past two weeks in the U.S. (where COVID is no longer a thing) than have died of COVID in China ever.

My how the goalpost has shifted.

> Well more people died of COVID in the past two weeks in the U.S

because they dont want to take the vaccine, its their choice. The govt should not force you to take the vaccine.

> West because we have working vaccines

PRC vaccines work about as well as western ones in preventing serious cases, which is to say western vaccines suck as much as PRC vaccines post delta when they couldn't do the one thing that distinguished themselves - preventing spread (which from recent Pfizer drama they didn't even test for so mRNA was... never substantially superior). Hence the entire narrative around superior mRNA wank is ridiculous considering how little benefits it has especially with extra cold chain requirements or just the geopolitics of trusting unreliable foreign govs.

Combine with west being systemically incapable of containing covid and PRC still left with only obvious choice of exercising superior state capcity to zero covid which prevents millions of deaths using stats of mRNA effectiveness in neighbouring east Asian countries. They're still locking down because state capacity > science, including the wests. Plenty of people are still dying from covid every week while 1/5 has long covid. Capitulating to living with covid due to lack of choice =/= covid's over.

The scope of Science has been set by private capital, but the Chinese lockdown is very clearly a scientific endeavor. Might as well compare vaccines vs. lockdown as two scientifically-informed tactics, although the two aren't mutually exclusive, as in the case of China.

The CCP has setup quarantine camps for COVID in Tibet: https://twitter.com/songpinganq/status/1571790317950763008

And red COVID QR Codes can destroy you: https://twitter.com/songpinganq/status/1562803858916933638

All I am seeing on HN are people being careful to not offend, but at some point it stops being "cultural differences".

> All I am seeing on HN are people being careful to not offend, but at some point it stops being "cultural differences".

That's exactly my problem, too. Thankfully, someone in the replies to the tweet you sent finishes his sentence without ellipses. "Which is more sad: that they are locked up, or that they allow themselves to be locked up?" But this time he hides behind the rhetorical question mark! Just say the two things already: "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars." Let's just skip right to the Myth of the Jew. I just want people to take their beliefs seriously instead of hiding behind vague gestures and "fill in the blanks."

> "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars."

No one is saying Chinese people are evil. My advice to you would be to stop making strawmans like this, that's not what people mean when they expose these atrocities. The CCP is the problem here and the authorities that are expunging basic civil rights in the name of COVID needs to be condemned. COVID is an excuse to control the population under the banner of 'zero-COVID policy'.

That's right. So the "cultural difference" you were referring to is the capacity to commit horrendous atrocities against basic civil rights that the West is too benevolent to grasp. You just used the words "expunging basic civil rights" and "atrocities" instead of "evil." You're one step further in the logical progression than the people you were annoyed with in your first reply to me.

This unfolding progression is why we cannot take people at face value about what they "really mean." People don't know what they mean! See below: "I honestly couldn't imagine people in the West putting up with that, however I'm yet to fully understand why Chinese people continue to suffer the rules without riot." See? They don't understand it. Why not? What is being repressed, that their conscious could form these highly abstract and grammatically correct sentences, but yet they don't know from whence they came?

Most of us are capable of distinguishing Chinese citizens from the CCP. It would be helpful to this discussion if you were to do the same.

The final step, you've unified the two sentences: "Chinese people are docile and weak or are evil, greedy liars."

Please point to where that unification took place. Be precise.

Well one difference with where I live is that we don’t jail doctors for trying to alert people of a new virus. We also get free elections that allows us to boot officials if they apply unpopular policies.