PS: This article is not what it seems. This is actually a pro-China piece.

  • @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    103 years ago

    Diatribe aside I also agree to an extent with muad’dibber. The author could have done better not to stoke racism. Some people are going to read this piece and come out thinking “so what you’re saying is Spanish people are cheaters?”. He has the right idea when he says that you are raised to steal whatever you can from the man. But that’s a problem of class, not culture. When you’re a poor prole from a working class family, and you see people out there driving their Bentleys in their new italian suits, of course you’ll feel right stealing from them. Why do they get more than you? That’s how the author should have framed the issue.

    Amerikans see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, and the political class likes to entertain this idea. Workers in Europe don’t.

    So when he’s talking about China stealing patents – maybe they are. If they are I will fucking cheer for them because patent law is bullshit. As someone who doesn’t own any patents my class interests are to dismantle the patent system. But also China does produce a ton of their own tech, they don’t have to steal all of it. That would have been a much better message from the author.

    Because when you’re writing articles like these to convince people, you have to make sure they don’t take away the wrong message. And again here it’s very easy for a lib to think “okay so china steals patents, we need to sanction them because it’s OUR patents dammit”.

  • Muad'DibberM
    link
    fedilink
    7
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    I couldn’t get more than a few paragraphs in, it was so orientalist.

    To give one pertinent example, China is absolutely 100% OK with “stealing” other peoples’ intellectual property. But to them, it’s not stealing — or at least it’s not viewed there in the same light that we view theft. We view cheating, and IP theft, as a form of “cheating at life”, and being grossly unfair to others, and we have sayings like “cheaters never prosper”, which we all know is bullshit but we say it anyway because we want to discourage cheating. Western society looks down on cheaters, and we think of them (at least a little bit) as bad people because they are cheating.

    But to the Chinese, and as you’ll see, also to most of the rest of the world, life is literally all a big game. If they succeed in hacking you and getting all your supposedly secure data, then They got you! Ha! You should have done a better job of protecting your damn data! It’s a victory to be celebrated, and although they may do it in private to maintain face, they celebrate just like you would if your team won a football game. Morality doesn’t even begin to factor into it for them.

    jfc it gets even worse:

    China is proof that cheaters can prosper. I am making this claim, once again, 100% without judgement. I have made my peace with it, and now I just need to explain it to YOU, so that you can also re-think your life planning for the next 20–30 years.

    Why am I harping on this uncomfortable subject? Well, it’s because China has “stolen” pretty much all the useful Intellectual Property and all the useful data from the US. And that has deep-seated, deep-rooted, super fucking important ramifications for US foreign and domestic policy. Ramifications which are largely being ignored because the rabbit hole goes very very deep, and it’s hard to untangle it all.

    I’m going to remind you repeatedly that there is no point in hating a hurricane. But you do need to prepare.

    This whole article is written from the perspective of “orientalist hordes coming to take over western civilization, and we must prepare for it!”

    • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      -23 years ago

      But to the Chinese, and as you’ll see, also to most of the rest of the world, life is literally all a big game. If

      • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
        link
        fedilink
        -23 years ago

        The author isn’t saying that the Chinese are uncivilized or barbaric or anything like that, they explicitly state that this applies to basically everyone except America. You would’ve seen this if you actually took the time to read the text.

        • Muad'DibberM
          link
          fedilink
          33 years ago

          Labeling China as “cheaters” and “a coming hurricane”, but its woke and not orientalist because I qualify it with “Not judging tho!” And yes, you are banned so we all don’t have to read walls of text defending google and amazon techbros.

    • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      -3
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      If you took the time to actually read the entire thing, you’ll realize that the author doesn’t believe cheating to be inherently bad, and that other cultures (inc. European and Spanish) also believe that, and that the American culture is the one that is off by believing that cheating is inherently bad.

    • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      -33 years ago

      But pretty much everyone else, China included, has a completely different world view, which is that you compete to win. There is no fairness except what others force upon you.

      So I’m not singling out China when I say they’re playing a different game. The core value system of the West, which is a combination of some shitty vestige of colonialist Jane-Austen-character “This is how a gentleman behaves” fairy-tale bullshit and equally shitty Puritanical religious moralizing, is predicated on “competing fairly”. By the West, I’m basically oversimplifying it to be the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe. Oh, and the “United” Kingdom. Whatever. You know what I mean by The West.

      The author is not singling out China. The author explicitly makes it clear that the author is not singling out China. If you actually took the time to you know, actually read what the author is saying, you would know that.

      • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
        link
        fedilink
        -23 years ago

        And you know what? The system is rigged against you. More evidence of this appears every single fucking day. So who’s to say the traditional Western moral compass regarding “fair play” is the right one here?

        • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
          link
          fedilink
          -23 years ago

          Please actually read the fucking article next time before screaming about some strawman you created of the author out of words taken out of context.

          • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
            link
            fedilink
            -1
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            But China’s “cheating” is different. It is not really dishonest to them, for some reasons I’ve already explained, but also for another very important reason: China is actually making good use of that stolen IP for their own citizens. China’s got solid Search now, and amazing global payment/finance systems, and they are on their way to having an electric-car offering that is as good as Tesla’s, because they would have stolen it from Tesla too except Elon just gave it away like a madman, and so on, across the entire board, industry-wide. They have their own 5G and their own handsets and their own e-commerce and ride hailing and social networking and entertainment and literally every other industry on earth. And their versions are all really good. In many ways they are already way better than the US versions, and where they’re not, they are catching up frighteningly fast. It’s easy to catch up when you start the race with everyone’s secret sauce!

            In fact, as far as I can tell, China seems to be building a bona-fide Utopia. Here in Seattle we’ve spent years and YEARS trying to get a shitty monorail built, and it’s far from done, while in China they have fucking bullet trains that go 250mph. China is spending a shit-ton on infrastructure, and not just in China. Here in the US we can’t get our fucking potholes repaired, and our bridges are rotted and rickety, and our buildings are crumbling, and I swear it looks apocalyptically bad when you bring visitors here from Asia.

            • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
              link
              fedilink
              -23 years ago

              I find it very shocking that people like you, western leftists, who pride yourselves on having read tens of thousands of pages of Marx and Lenin, fail to even pick up on flat-out statements with zero nuance whatsoever.

              • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
                link
                fedilink
                -13 years ago

                China is building infrastructure all over the world, and their major cities are astonishing enough to be the backdrops for Bond movies; Singapore, amazing as it is, is often called “Little Shanghai”, because it is a goddamn runt in comparison. It’s fucking cool to be living in China right now. Does that sting? It should sting, a little.

                In fact a lot of you just had aneurysms over that statement. China is Bad, is the refrain you hear over and over, because look what they are doing to these people and those people and those other people, and so on.

                I’m telling you, and I’ll keep telling you, ranting against the hurricane will not stop it. China’s world dominance is inevitable, and the US has completely fucking lost itself all in the space of one Presidential administration, so nothing on this Earth is going to stop China at this point. And you need to stop thinking of them as Evil, and you need to stop right fucking now, because forces of Nature are not Evil. They are just forces. 1.3 billion people is a Force of Nature, one that we can’t even begin to fully comprehend, let alone compare with.

                “This whole article is written from the perspective of “orientalist hordes coming to take over western civilization, and we must prepare for it!””

                k

                • @wptk@lemmygrad.mlOP
                  link
                  fedilink
                  -23 years ago

                  Does that sound orientalist to you? Does that fucking sound orientalist to you? Does telling people to stop fucking hating China sound fucking orientalist to you?

  • Free Palestine
    link
    fedilink
    33 years ago

    imagine thinking chain replying to yourself 12 times with quotes with bolding and Italics will change that this article is kinda yikes, and that a person being anti-American and claiming to be pro-Chinese changes that they’re still using bad arguments.