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by theredbox 2211 days ago
>Apart from "it is an evil, vile country",

My family had been at the receiving end of such countries. Twice. I dont believe in a policy of appeasement. At all. China is too similar to Nazi Germany for me to ignore it. It is an evil, vile country that has deception and absolute disregard to human rights deeply rooted at its core. The youtuber SerpentZA only scratches the surface of what this country is doing to not only its people.

And this is not an overstatement. To compare it to countries like Korea and Japan would be doing disservice to these countries. They are both objectively racist. Are they evil?

Well not at the moment. Imperial Japan was evil. Current Japan is just hypocritical.

>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20357430

This was too long ago for me to remember it. I have no idea what I meant in the context of that discussion.

>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22538538

I honestly believe americans are overreacting much more than any other nationality I have ever observed. It's a cultural trait.

>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23135072

I have refused to engage in that discussion calling the op out on his behavior.

1 comments

These judgments about entire countries are much too grandiose and strident to count as thoughtful comments here. No matter how you feel about policy there are always many people in any country who are not part of it. Some of them are on HN. Those readers have a right to come here and not see comments denouncing their country and often (by implication if not explicitly) their ethnicity, and in a way their families too. Moreover, since such comments are pure flamebait, they are a vector toward this site destroying itself with flamewar and we have a duty to prevent that.

I appreciate what you say about the history of your family. I'd be interested to hear more about that, if there were a good context for it. Still, we need room for more gradations of behavior than extreme words like "appeasement" allow for. If the logic here is "China" -> "I don't believe in appeasement" -> "China is evil", that's far too blunt an instrument to smash into HN conversations with. You're not doing any good by fighting battles in that way. You're just adding, in a small way, more violence, and giving people a good reason (emotionally if not rationally) to retaliate.

I think it would be best if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and try to take the spirit of this site more to heart. You're welcome here. But those guidelines are not an arbitrary hodge-podge of tonal tastes. They're carefully designed, through deep experience over many years, to try to prevent this forum from destroying itself, the way that internet forums traditionally have. That was the founding intention of this site [1], and it's no small matter. Internet discussions have a strong tendency to flamewar, and internet forums turn into scorched earth by default [2]. We're trying to stave that fate off for as long as we can [3]. For that reason, we have no choice but to ban accounts that refuse to help protect the commons here.

I think if you would stretch a bit to understand this, and see why the rules are the way they are, you'd realize that it's in your interest to participate in the community in a different way—one that is less bludgeoning. It's in your interest because that's what keeps the community interesting, which is the only reason any of us comes here. You can still make all your substantive points if you switch from a denunciatory/flamewar style to a thoughtful/curious one. Indeed, they'll be better for it and will probably lead you to new insights that make for better comments yet.

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

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

>These judgments about entire countries are much too grandiose and strident to count as thoughtful comments here.

They are not really thoughtful comments. I dont know how productive they are but I guess some people appreciate them. I dont want to contribute to a circlejerk of "we hate china". For sure not.

I usually get carried away though.

>Those readers have a right to come here and not see comments denouncing their country and often (by implication if not explicitly) their ethnicity, and in a way their families too. Moreover, since such comments are pure flamebait, they are a vector toward this site destroying itself with flamewar and we have a duty to prevent that.

Sure do I have the right not to be dismissed by "americansplaining"?

I dont really disagree with anything you have said I just find it incredibly difficult to discuss controversial topics on the internet.