refenestrator

This has been eating me up all day in case you happen to check in again.

I didn't start posting to whine about being banned a few months ago, I was more concerned about the immediate thread.. but since you brought up my posts, you specifically told me while banning me that civility wasn't "good enough". I was doing this exact recommended pattern of responding patiently and civilly at the moment that you banned me.

Maybe I'm just really oblivious, or a congenitally bad poster, but what would be good enough? It's irrelevant since I'm banned but I always like to self-improve if I can, there must be something I'm missing here. If you're busy or don't see this, no biggie.

Ok, fine. Food for thought:

You'd probably like to ban the topic entirely, but it'd be weird to have one banned topic and you've said that doesn't work, so that's out.

So what's left, being even-handed, I guess. Except it's a 10-1 ratio, so being even-handed, ban people from both sides leaves you with a 9-0 ratio.. congrats? Even if you're really, really, really trying to be even-handed with regards to content, most people would bias towards handing out 50-50 to feel fair, while 10-1 (or whatever ratio) is actually statistically fair. But that would feel quite biased if you did it! Practically taking a side! So we get a phenomenon where a bad Chinese-adjacent comment (or even a polite one) is super likely to be moderated, but you can't possibly moderate all of the really bad anti-China comments in this thread, there's too many, they rule the day and they establish truth for passersby.

Tech is one of the few industries with a large Chinese minority during this time of rising tension. It would vastly improve the intellectual tone of the site if we had more of them explaining their viewpoint and less of people telling them they're brainwashed.

Failing that, I think the actual real-world answer is to pro-actively push down the repetitive anti-China stories that hit the front page multiple times a week, and then just deny it if anyone asks. They're not intellectually interesting, they're hostile to a significant tech minority, and you don't like the flamewar. Why keep them?

Look at this immediate thread above your comment, majority vote did decide the truth about how Chinese people think (they're brainwashed!). Then you scolded someone who got salty about it.

It's not just a civility burden, it's a factual burden.

If somebody came onto HN posting obviously dumb stuff about how American people feel and think, they'd be downvoted, because everyone can see the obvious falsehood.

But when it's Chinese, majority vote of Americans decides the truth! They will tell you the real deal on how things work inside China. And if someone calls them morons, we have you to come in and keep things civil.

Just so long as we're clear that my "ideological battle" was scattershot takes across a bunch of different topics. I'd hate to be thought of as having a coherent ideology :)

That's just not an accurate summary of my posting history. I post on a wide range of topics. The last 2 weeks I posted about bitcoin, education policy, tax policy, the British royal family, software architecture and that upvoted comment on the Chappelle thread that you flagged (which was admittedly wading into the muck a bit).

I'm sympathetic to the fact that flame wars about China are too common here, and hey, banning the non-american point of view might end them, circlejerks can only go so far on their own. So maybe you're right, but I wouldn't be super satisfied with that solution.

Was I not respectful?

The shape of global politics is interesting to me. Your call.

Invade where? Tajikistan? The thing about belt and road is.. we could do that, too. Instead we blow a fortune in the middle east and get salty at them for being smarter.

As far as china's ambitions go, anything can change but they have a long, long history of non-interventionism. It's hard to justify ideologically when they teach every schoolkid about the century of humiliation and the evils of colonialism.

Cite? Do you have a quote from "China" on this?

I think Xi is quite clear on his view of China's place in the world: hegemon in their region but no desire to be global police like America.

You don't need to be accredited to buy bitcoin.

You might need to be accredited to invest in a bank that operates on bitcoin, or have all your money parked on an exchange that operates in bitcoin, unless they're willing to do the paperwork. These are things that can and should be audited regularly if they're going to hold a lot of people's money.

If they don't want to restrict themselves to accredited investors, they could alternatively adhere to SEC guidelines for selling financial instruments to the public. Clear auditing, GAAP, prospectus including a frank discussion of risks, etc. It's really not that high a bar, considering the $ involved.

You can't ask for no accountability, these rules are written in blood (or red, I guess).

"Many" people is a weasel word, a couple dozen could qualify.

It's only an issue for the media-addicted and those who fill airtime for a living.