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by JumpCrisscross 502 days ago
> mentioning them here on Hacker News would be taboo also

Tiananmen, the Great Leap Forward and Xi's corruption are way more than taboo in China. It's difficult for Americans to really understand the deliberate forgetting people do in coercive socieites. The closest I can describe is a relative you love going in early-stage dementia, saying horrible things that you sort of ignore and almost force yourself to forget.

(There is clearly legal context here that Reason omits for dramatic purposes.)
2 comments
cubefox 502 days ago
> Tiananmen, the Great Leap Forward and Xi's corruption are way more than taboo in China.

I wasn't suggesting otherwise.

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LinXitoW 502 days ago
In a world where the presidents closest "friend" can do a Hitler salute, twice, people are more focussed on getting Pro Palestinians fired, arrested, etc.

That very much fits any of the censorship China has going on.

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doctoboggan 502 days ago
Yet here we are discussing it without fear of repercussion.
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Muromec 502 days ago
Which may be more of your mistake than an actual absense of consequences. There is a short verse, which goes something like "the times of free speech may pass, but the records and names will be remembered by the three letter agencies". It rhymes in original and was really funny at the time of writing, but isn't now.
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JumpCrisscross 502 days ago
> a world where the presidents closest "friend" can do a Hitler salute, twice, people are more focussed on getting Pro Palestinians fired, arrested, etc. That very much fits any of the censorship China has going on

No, it doesn't. You're criticising in-group blindness. That's a problem. But it's mitigated by a competitive political system because each group has an incentive to call out the other's blinds spots. When this competition ceases, you get groupthink. The last major era of American groupthink was the W. Bush White House. It preceded America's greatest geopolitical disasters in decades.

Under Xi, China went from having quiet competition within the CCP to reigning in a state of groupthink. We don't know what moronic ideas Xi's friends hold because there is nobody in power with an incentive to call that sort of thing out.

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