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I arrived in China 2001.

I experienced the harshest and largest lockdown in all of history: Wuhan, January 23rd, 2020. A real lockdown, not the cosplay bullshit you experienced outside of China. (Yes, this is me saying you’ve never fucking set foot in the country.)

The rest you’re just flat-out lying about. Sorry, Sparky. Did pet killings happen? Yes. They were not the mass shit that the press you’re so obviously reciting acts like they were. Did some doors get welded? Yes. But nowhere near you and, again, nowhere near in the masses the press you’re basing your lies on made it seem like. The local salaries are garbage iff you’re a fuckwit sitting in the west applying western prices to Chinese salaries. (Which, naturally, you are, good little fuckwit liar that you are.) And you’ve changed your tune from 14 hours to 12 hours really fucking quickly there, Sparky, not to mention using the proper slang only after I gave it to you.

So yeah, you’re just a west-dwelling fuckwit lying about being here. Go toddle off in your China Watcher corners and play with the rest of the intellectual children you belong with. There’s a good boy.

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Yes. Some people are beyond hope. Therefore we shouldn’t bother with empathy with all people. This is exactly how logic works. Yes.

But yes, indeed, some people are beyond hope. It’s why I won’t bother engaging with you further. (Guess where you just got categorized…)

You’re also conflating empathy with acquiescence.

Indeed. This is because he lacks actual empathy so doesn’t actually comprehend the very concept.

Yes. That’s exactly what everybody here is saying.

I resubmit: you lack all capacity to comprehend any viewpoint other than yours and will only damage anything you believe in as a result.

That “slippery slope” is absolutely vital to slither down if you want to formulate public policy.

If you don’t understand why people mistrust “big pharma” or “big government” or “big [sobriquet]” and reflexively dismiss anything that involves them, you cannot formulate public policy that will be effective.

Very rarely do people say “I’m going to dismiss centuries of scientific progress for this quack cure” without a reason. It’s maybe not a reason you agree with. It’s maybe not a reason reality agrees with. But you know what it might be? It might be a reason that traces back to how “big [sobriquet]” has acted toward such people in the past, often persistently over a long period of time, that has led to that breakdown in trust. In short: you (as in the beneficiaries of the status quo and “big [sobriquet]”, directly or indirectly) may be at least partially historically culpable in the opposition you now face.

Now I get it: accepting that you yourself are partially culpable for “irrational” opposition is a bitter elixir to swallow, but if you don’t take that first step toward understanding, you can’t take the second step to correcting the problem. And the problem will continue to fester and take root until, oh, I don’t know, something utterly fucking insane happens and a million of your fellow citizens die in a public health disaster because half your population doesn’t trust the very institutions that were needed to prevent said disaster.

So maybe you should learn to enjoy sliding down slippery slopes. Or, you know, die in the next easily-preventable pandemic. Like a million of your fellow citizens (assuming you’re American: insert your own numbers for your own country if not) did in the current one.

Not all people can be persuaded by “connected knowing” (not a big fan of this terminology), but many can be (over time).

NOBODY, however, who can’t be persuaded by “connected knowing” will be persuaded by “separate learning”, so I’m not sure what your point here is.

In human language: You are completely and absolutely devoid of any degree of empathy or compassion and thus your own worst enemy when it comes to persuading others. You are far more likely to damage any cause you espouse than to promulgate it.

Human enough for you? If you’d rather have it in binary bits, let me know which ISA you are programmed in and I’ll write the program that explains it to you.

Apparently you care enough to comment.

A Windows IRC client … to access Lemmy?

That would be a high technical bar to entry!

Having lived through the “Eternal September” beginnings, I’m sorry but you’ve got very strongly rose-tinted glasses on.

(Ref)USENET was a cesspool on the order of any modern *chan board or their ilk both before and after the Eternal September. Having a high technical bar to entry just meant most participants were obsessive lunatics with poor socialization (instead of merely half).

It was quoted just a bit above you, dude:

7.0: The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Republic of Finland Suomen.

I get that all the time. It amused me greatly until the day I found out I can turn off the Fantasy Internet Points entirely. Now I have no idea if my votes are up or down or sideways.

And I don’t care.

OK, let me unpack a few things here.

1. It is emphatically not racist to criticize a government’s actions.
2. It is emphatically racist, however, to assume every (perceived) citizen of a government’s nation is uncritically accepting of their government.

And here’s where it gets messy.

The China Watchers™ crowd always says they “hate the government, not the citizens”. (The fact that this echoes extremist Christian bigotry with “hate the sin, not the sinner” whenever they go on rampages against every social group they disapprove of is a feature, not a bug. They know their audience well.)

Yet…

Ask anybody with a (perceived) Chinese name how often they have been called upon by China Watchers™ to personally account for the Chinese government’s actions. You will likely get a shock by how often these people who “hate the government, not the citizens” take perceived citizens to task for their government’s actions (while at the same time, in a stunning display of utter hypocrisy, refuse to take responsibility for their own governments’ actions despite (technically) having a say in who that government is (which Chinese citizens don’t have).

Chinese citizens. People of other nationalities resident in China. People with (perceived) Chinese names or looks. These all get hounded by the “hate the government, not the citizens” crowd with a zeal that puts the “not the citizens” part of things in the firm category of “blatant lie”.

And that is just flat-out racism.

So while yes, technically, people criticizing the Chinese government aren’t being racist (and holy fucking SHIT are there good reasons to criticize them!), the reality is that most of the people doing so are hiding behind that technicality and are being racist as all fuck, so often, in fact, that it’s my default assumption unless I see evidence to the contrary.

You don’t like that default? Well, here’s a bit of sage advice I got from an activist friend of mine in the late '80s: “Rein in your crazies or you’ll be mistaken for them.”

I’m at work. I can’t watch video at the moment.

But I can make some guesses.

“Random stranger with a camera crew walks up to a citizen of an authoritarian state and asks ‘do you know what happened today?’.”

Fuck yeah I’m going to turn away and walk off. Hell I’d be tempted to do it in Canada! (Not a fan of most Canadian media.)

… how could the Chinese government enforce this vast national amnesia of a major, recent event in their country’s history, one in which the government sent troops to slaughter perhaps 2,600 peaceful protesters?

In the very first paragraph Vox gets it wrong.

Not a surprise.

Here’s a little hint: look up Columbia University’s Columbia Journalism Review and see if you can tell why I’m laughing at Vox right now.

If you can’t work out the difference between “lived in China for 23 years” and “is Chinese” then there’s no help for you.

Of course you couldn’t read a statement that baldly said the PRC’s government wasn’t a good one, so there’s that for you as well.

Oh, this is going to be juicy!

Tell me what you think happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. I’ll wait with the reams and reams and reams of corrections on standby. (Hint: There’s a very good chance that literally everything you “know” about Tiananmen Square is wrong. Just as a taste of what’s to come if you take the bait: “tank man” wasn’t run over by a tank. No matter what you think you know.)