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by ptenk 2852 days ago
The sinophobia in these comments always makes me uncomfortable because it’s usually underlied with overall anti-Asian sentiment. It reminds me that I don’t belong in America, we still live in a white world.
4 comments

This is really the main goal of these threads. It's your standard Two Minute Hate [1]: everybody gets together and signals their own virtue by spewing fact-free nonsense (apparently China's entire 11T is run by bribes and no foreign company ever made money there). There are two goals here: signal the ingroup but more importantly signal the outgroup. It's a concerted effort to drive away Asian programmers and, as I've pointed out before, it's working.

Note that despite these highly coordinated, anti-China circlejerks (seriously look at the other thread [2], just two down, all the same people and new accounts spouting the same exact nonsense, virtually all of it baseless propaganda) the moderators are to pounce on any "meta-commentary" that tries to pushback or highlight the stupidity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820157

Not that I recommend it, but if you read all my comments on this issue you'll see that people are accusing us of siding with "pro-China shills" much more than "anti-China bigotry" as you have. In reality, of course, it's neither: we're just trying to prevent HN from going up in nationalistic flames. What does it matter whether those flames are red or white or blue or some combo thereof? The point is not to burn to a crisp.

We need you to stop insinuating astroturfing in the threads ("highly coordinated"). People are simply divided on this issue and it's a gross violation of the HN guidelines to insinuate otherwise. All it does is escalate the toxicity and we don't allow people to do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you think this is not a coordinated effort than you are very naive.

It's worth pointing out what is actually happening here. This story about "massive internment camps" has been pushed relentlessly on HN for the past two weeks. There's been at least five stories on it.

Actual journalists investigated the story and proved quite clearly the story has been entirely fabricated [1].

Post the results of this story on HN and it is immediately flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846148

At this point I think it pretty fair to say there is a highly coordinated effort to push a wholly fake anti-China story.

> In reality, of course, it's neither: we're just trying to prevent HN from going up in nationalistic flames.

Somehow you think being "neutral" is the right strategy when one side is invested in a deliberate propaganda effort.

[1] https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-chi...

Internment camps are a very real and valid reason to be afraid of China...
I don't see any anti-Asian sentiment in any of these comments (everything is directed at the current Chinese government) and yes, the West is a white world, whether you like it or not.
Examples please.