8 ms·

> incompetency "corruption"

by kabdib 8mo ago

threethirtytwo 8mo ago
[flagged]
- tosapple 8mo ago
  Wait until you live through what Argentina or Brasil have then see how you feel about redress, petition and speech.
  - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
    I'm specifically talking about Chinas' lack of freedoms... which is entirely different then Brasil or Argentina. I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.
    - tosapple 8mo ago
      Exercise like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... Right?
      - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
        Yes, the event is Tiananmen Square. And on the moral axis, there is no ambiguity. It was a tragedy. People were killed for demanding political change. History does not need softening there, and I am not interested in doing that. But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible. It is not. The uncomfortable reality is that history does not grade outcomes on intentions. It grades them on stability, continuity, and what comes after. The question is not whether Tiananmen Square was morally wrong. It was. The harder question is whether allowing that movement to succeed would have produced a better long term outcome for China, or whether it would have fractured the country into something far worse. At that moment, China was not a mature liberal democracy waiting to be unlocked. It was a fragile state emerging from famine, revolution, and internal collapse. Power vacuums do not fill themselves with enlightenment. They fill with chaos, factionalism, and often bloodshed on a scale that makes a single atrocity look small in hindsight. The leadership chose order over moral legitimacy. They chose continuity over uncertainty. They decided that dissent, even righteous dissent, was a risk they could not allow. The cost was horrific. The result was a state that remained intact, centralized, and capable of executing long term plans. And execution matters. A lot. Today, you can live in China and experience a society that functions at scale. Infrastructure appears where it is planned. Cities are built. Systems work. The future arrives on schedule. For many ordinary people, daily life feels stable, predictable, and materially improved compared to what came before. Now contrast that with San Francisco. A city that prides itself on moral clarity, individual rights, and moral signaling. A city that debates endlessly and acts reluctantly. A city where compassion has become so fragmented across competing claims that enforcing basic order is treated as cruelty. The result is visible on the streets. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Real decay, real suffering, real dysfunction. This does not mean repression is good. It means the world forces tradeoffs whether we consent to them or not. There is no system that gets everything. There is no button you press that yields justice, freedom, stability, and progress simultaneously. China accepted moral debt to buy coherence and speed. The West often accepts paralysis to preserve moral self image. Both choices carry costs. One is just easier to condemn from a distance. The other is easier to live with emotionally while things quietly fall apart. If you want to argue morality, you will win the rhetorical point immediately. Tiananmen Square ends the conversation. But if you want to understand how nations actually become what they are, you have to step into the grey zone where history operates, where choices are made under uncertainty, and where the alternative paths are not clean, heroic, or guaranteed to be better. The world is imperfect. Every society is built on compromises it would rather not examine too closely. The honest discussion is not about pretending one side is pure. It is about acknowledging that values shape outcomes, and that no outcome is free.
        nothrabannosir 8mo ago
        I love the opening of this comment, very poignant. I’m not convinced however that the conclusion follows from the setup. “The West” is more than just America. And America is very easy to condemn from a distance. Actually everything is easy to condemn from a distance. There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. In fact it is a two and a half century experiment on building a society around transparency, with the question of what is Right and what is Just at its core, and how does a society follow from that. And compared to where the world was when it was conceived, the experiment has certainly yielded vastly more results than your comment gives it credit for, by only looking at San Francisco today. It is evidence that the dichotomy between morality and building a society is a false one. Meanwhile, tian an men square was in 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. When will it be paid off? And will the Chinese then say, “ok, we get it, that’s the price we had to pay”? Because if the ball suddenly drops and they rebel after all, as soon as censorship is lifted, you didn’t buy anything for that debt. So what then—keep taking out more moral debt? Forever? China’s moral debt feels much like America’s national debt :) Anyway like I said I loved the opening half of your comment though.
        maxglute 8mo ago
        > 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. IMO mistake to frame censorship as a debt, when it's domestic investment in stability, just like policing or infra, or epidemiologic pathogen control. You don't stop investing in essential nation building. Simply part of domestic infosphere management against unwanted influence, which essentially all countries have recognized PRC is prescient. As for 6/4 specifically, future gens will look back and realize 3-4 digit deaths less than rounding error in terms of Chinese history, having 1000s yrs of events/context sharpens evaluation. Like how Mao 70% good, 30% bad evaluation will turn to 90% good, 10% bad, because what's a few 10s of millions starved to death when his engineering projects and industrialization efforts actually ended 1000s of years of reoccurring famine / Malthusian traps. It will be recognize as "price of future", i.e. retrospectives tend to evaluate empires less on carnage (which is assumed) but on the frameworks they leave behind. >“The West” is more than just America. The west is generally built on the same template as America, extractive exploitation of not only itself but others, aka, built off surplus blood and treasure from colonialism, except society indoctrinated to believe such is natural order and just. Generations pass, surplus snowballs to buy more rights and freedom and enable more introspection, where colonialism can be acknowledged as stain, but on the margins. West rarely acknowledge that often the fine line between able to experiment vs subsist is funded by foreign extractive surplus. Skewing global balance sheet of energy and resources enable building and experimenting and bribing peripheries, liberalism = luxury experiments derivative product of colonial surplus. We see how fast it erodes when physical resources contracts. Regardless, when looting from another, the geopolitical balance sheet no longer remains domestic, like America, it starts geopolitical debts that likely can't be default without eventual consequence. Mistreated countries have long memories, and being mistreated, humiliated if you will (and we're not talking bout only PRC), those memories do not tend to soften with time, and can really only repaid in catharsis. AKA there maybe a day when global south develops/catches up and coerce the west pay their debts. It could be 100s of years from now or current events could hint interregnum where power shifts and debts are soon collected.
- wbronitsky 8mo ago
  I think parsing out what kind of freedom would help here. The US has a lot of “freedom of” but not a lot of “freedom from.”
  - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
    Any freedom. For example you don't have the freedom to own guns in China.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bmitc 8mo ago
      Who cares?
      - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
        Exactly. I don't care about owning guns. I don't care about the overwhelming majority of the freedoms the US provides to me for which China does not provide.
    - tclancy 8mo ago
      Is that a freedom? You're defining everything as though the US were the optimal model of society. Couldn't I just as easily define the freedom to be safe from guns?
      - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
        What? I'm defining China, a country with less freedoms, AS more optimal then the US. I think that comment about guns threw everyone off. People are very liberal on HN and at the same time very patriotic. They support gun control and ironically more freedoms at the same time so I think you and the other guy didn't realize that you both support China's lack of freedom in the aspect of owning guns.
      - mixmastamyk 8mo ago
- elmomle 8mo ago
  It's not a linear relationship where you trade one for the other. You don't just get a more competent government by giving up freedoms.
  - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
    There is a relationship here. It is not a perfect one, but it is real, and pretending otherwise just avoids the tradeoff. Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory. The result is predictable. I will never see a functioning high speed rail system in California in my lifetime. Neither will anyone alive today. Not because we lack money or engineering talent, but because the accumulation of individual rights makes collective action nearly impossible. Now look at China. They decide to build it, and it gets built. If you are in the way, you move. If persuasion fails, coercion follows. Freedoms are not part of the equation. That contrast is uncomfortable, but it is real. Freedom buys dignity and protection from abuse. It also buys paralysis. China sacrifices individual rights and gets infrastructure. California preserves individual rights and gets endless meetings, delays, and nothing on the ground. You can argue which system is morally superior. You cannot argue that they produce the same outcomes.
    - macintux 8mo ago
      Autocracy can (and perhaps usually does) produce corruption, and there's no guarantee that progress will be beneficial. I agree there are tradeoffs, but it's worth pointing out that sacrificing freedom does not reliably produce useful results.
    - angled 8mo ago
      But what of the culture? For years now the art and music has felt like poor cousins to what is in the west, similar to what we see generated by AI now, and consumed be people doomscrolling on WeChat moments while they wait for their didi to deliver their food from the shop down the street. Every time I visit SZ now it feels like the scooters are misrouted neurons firing in any which direction, with no respect for pedestrians, parking, or the rest of the city.
- CodingJeebus 8mo ago
  This is one of the most insane things I’ve ever read on this forum. The assertion that being able to summarily execute people you accuse of corruption somehow reduces corruption is absurd. If that were true, places like Russia would have no corruption. Being a dictator just ensures that corruption flows your way as the leader.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
    Calling something “insane” is not an argument. It is a way to terminate a line of reasoning before it forces you to confront tradeoffs you would rather not look at. Once you label a position as madness, you no longer have to examine whether it explains real outcomes in the world. That move shortens the discussion, but it does not strengthen your position. You are also arguing against a claim that was not made. No one is saying that executions somehow purify human nature or permanently eliminate corruption. The claim is narrower, colder, and more uncomfortable: extreme enforcement can sharply reduce certain forms of corruption for long periods of time, and that reduction can produce real, measurable benefits that save lives at scale. This is not theoretical. Take food safety. In China, officials and executives have been executed for large scale food adulteration scandals. Morally, that is horrifying. Practically, it created an environment where cutting corners suddenly carried catastrophic personal risk. The result was a rapid tightening of compliance in industries where negligence or fraud can poison millions. Fewer tainted products means fewer dead children. That tradeoff does not become imaginary just because it makes us uneasy. The same logic applies to infrastructure. When corruption in construction is treated as a capital crime, bridges do not collapse as often. Buildings are less likely to be built with fraudulent materials. Rail systems are less likely to be sabotaged by kickbacks and subcontracting fraud. One execution looks monstrous in isolation. The thousands of lives not lost to structural failure rarely make headlines because they never happened. Singapore offers a milder but still illustrative example. It did not rely on executions, but it imposed severe, credible punishment and relentless enforcement for corruption. The outcome is one of the least corrupt governments on the planet and a state that functions with extraordinary efficiency. The lesson is not that brutality is good. The lesson is that consequences matter, and when they are weak, delayed, or politically negotiable, corruption flourishes. Russia is not the counterexample you think it is. Corruption there thrives precisely because enforcement is selective and loyalty based. Power protects insiders rather than disciplines them. That is not what happens in systems where even high ranking officials can be credibly destroyed for crossing certain lines. Treating all authoritarian systems as identical collapses meaningful distinctions into a slogan. You are framing this as a moral debate because morality is the easiest place to win rhetorically. Summary execution is evil. Everyone agrees. End of discussion. But that does not answer the structural question of why some societies manage to enforce standards at scale while others drown in fraud, decay, and institutional rot. The world does not offer clean choices. Every system kills people, just in different ways. One system kills visibly, deliberately, and brutally. Another kills slowly through negligence, corruption, drug tainted streets, collapsing infrastructure, and the quiet abandonment of public order. One death looks shocking. Ten thousand avoided deaths look like nothing at all. If you refuse to engage with that reality, you are not taking the moral high ground. You are opting out of the analysis entirely. And calling that insanity does not make it go away. It just signals an unwillingness to sit in the grey zone where cause, effect, and moral cost actually live.
- mbivert 8mo ago
  > Less corruption there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then: 1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason 2. there's corruption > Less incompetency one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally. furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners. I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority. > Less freedom for stuff like protesting this is a watered-down description of the actual situation. you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means. [0]: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/investigations-into-top-military-leadership-mark-a-new-phase-in-chinas-anti-corruption-campaign/ https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/investigations-in... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
  - bmitc 8mo ago
    > one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally. Is that true?
    - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
      Not strictly true. There's more of a tendency for this to be true-ish.
  - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
    >there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then: >1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason >2. there's corruption > Less incompetency You're just compressing reality so the logic becomes simple. But your analysis loses the nuance. First of all no one said there's no corruption in China. Corruption is everywhere... saying there's none is a practical impossibility. Second. In 2025 983,000 people received disciplinary sanctions.... If what China claims is true or even partially true it means corruption was reduced on a scale that cannot be replicated in the US. You analysis is valid, but inconclusive. >furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners. >I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority. First of all let me be frank. I am asian. I am genetically Chinese and culturally western. My comment was purely about centralized systems of government and how THAT effects competency and not at all about the competency of the population seperate from that. That being said, average IQ in China is higher than the US, that is a statistical fact. I did not comment on how that translates into this argument or what IQ even means in reality. I'm going to avoid that argument because I have no opinion on it. >this is a watered-down description of the actual situation. >you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means. You're right. I did water it down. But I still stand by my point. I won't in actuality participate in activities that will lead to these types of consequences so restricting me of these freedoms is something I practically don't care about. The religious argument is valid. But what do you think of scientology? Cults. Basically the religions that China cracks down on are religions it considers to be similar to scientology. Ultimately these things are bullshit. I'm not religious so, again practically speaking it doesn't affect me. I think most HNers are also atheist or agnostic.
verdverm 8mo ago
spite of one man child
- bmitc 8mo ago
  The sad truth is that it's millions of people. These people just want to see the world burn due to nothing but narcissism and hate of the imaginary "other side".
  - PaulHoule 8mo ago
    There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.
    - jfengel 8mo ago
      That's how parties work, of necessity. They are all uneasy alliances of people who can barely tolerate each other. People find the one that supports their most important issues and hopefully few things they really detest. Then they have to pay at least lip service to all of it. By getting everyone else's support, at least one or two of your favorite issues get worked on. In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
      - CrossVR 8mo ago
        > That's how two party systems work Fixed that for you. There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.

> incompetency "corruption"

by kabdib 8mo ago

> incompetency "corruption"

threethirtytwo 8mo ago

[flagged]

tosapple 8mo ago
Wait until you live through what Argentina or Brasil have then see how you feel about redress, petition and speech.
- threethirtytwo 8mo ago
  I'm specifically talking about Chinas' lack of freedoms... which is entirely different then Brasil or Argentina. I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.
  - tosapple 8mo ago
    Exercise like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... Right?
    - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
      Yes, the event is Tiananmen Square. And on the moral axis, there is no ambiguity. It was a tragedy. People were killed for demanding political change. History does not need softening there, and I am not interested in doing that. But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible. It is not. The uncomfortable reality is that history does not grade outcomes on intentions. It grades them on stability, continuity, and what comes after. The question is not whether Tiananmen Square was morally wrong. It was. The harder question is whether allowing that movement to succeed would have produced a better long term outcome for China, or whether it would have fractured the country into something far worse. At that moment, China was not a mature liberal democracy waiting to be unlocked. It was a fragile state emerging from famine, revolution, and internal collapse. Power vacuums do not fill themselves with enlightenment. They fill with chaos, factionalism, and often bloodshed on a scale that makes a single atrocity look small in hindsight. The leadership chose order over moral legitimacy. They chose continuity over uncertainty. They decided that dissent, even righteous dissent, was a risk they could not allow. The cost was horrific. The result was a state that remained intact, centralized, and capable of executing long term plans. And execution matters. A lot. Today, you can live in China and experience a society that functions at scale. Infrastructure appears where it is planned. Cities are built. Systems work. The future arrives on schedule. For many ordinary people, daily life feels stable, predictable, and materially improved compared to what came before. Now contrast that with San Francisco. A city that prides itself on moral clarity, individual rights, and moral signaling. A city that debates endlessly and acts reluctantly. A city where compassion has become so fragmented across competing claims that enforcing basic order is treated as cruelty. The result is visible on the streets. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Real decay, real suffering, real dysfunction. This does not mean repression is good. It means the world forces tradeoffs whether we consent to them or not. There is no system that gets everything. There is no button you press that yields justice, freedom, stability, and progress simultaneously. China accepted moral debt to buy coherence and speed. The West often accepts paralysis to preserve moral self image. Both choices carry costs. One is just easier to condemn from a distance. The other is easier to live with emotionally while things quietly fall apart. If you want to argue morality, you will win the rhetorical point immediately. Tiananmen Square ends the conversation. But if you want to understand how nations actually become what they are, you have to step into the grey zone where history operates, where choices are made under uncertainty, and where the alternative paths are not clean, heroic, or guaranteed to be better. The world is imperfect. Every society is built on compromises it would rather not examine too closely. The honest discussion is not about pretending one side is pure. It is about acknowledging that values shape outcomes, and that no outcome is free.
      - nothrabannosir 8mo ago
        I love the opening of this comment, very poignant. I’m not convinced however that the conclusion follows from the setup. “The West” is more than just America. And America is very easy to condemn from a distance. Actually everything is easy to condemn from a distance. There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. In fact it is a two and a half century experiment on building a society around transparency, with the question of what is Right and what is Just at its core, and how does a society follow from that. And compared to where the world was when it was conceived, the experiment has certainly yielded vastly more results than your comment gives it credit for, by only looking at San Francisco today. It is evidence that the dichotomy between morality and building a society is a false one. Meanwhile, tian an men square was in 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. When will it be paid off? And will the Chinese then say, “ok, we get it, that’s the price we had to pay”? Because if the ball suddenly drops and they rebel after all, as soon as censorship is lifted, you didn’t buy anything for that debt. So what then—keep taking out more moral debt? Forever? China’s moral debt feels much like America’s national debt :) Anyway like I said I loved the opening half of your comment though.
        maxglute 8mo ago
        > 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. IMO mistake to frame censorship as a debt, when it's domestic investment in stability, just like policing or infra, or epidemiologic pathogen control. You don't stop investing in essential nation building. Simply part of domestic infosphere management against unwanted influence, which essentially all countries have recognized PRC is prescient. As for 6/4 specifically, future gens will look back and realize 3-4 digit deaths less than rounding error in terms of Chinese history, having 1000s yrs of events/context sharpens evaluation. Like how Mao 70% good, 30% bad evaluation will turn to 90% good, 10% bad, because what's a few 10s of millions starved to death when his engineering projects and industrialization efforts actually ended 1000s of years of reoccurring famine / Malthusian traps. It will be recognize as "price of future", i.e. retrospectives tend to evaluate empires less on carnage (which is assumed) but on the frameworks they leave behind. >“The West” is more than just America. The west is generally built on the same template as America, extractive exploitation of not only itself but others, aka, built off surplus blood and treasure from colonialism, except society indoctrinated to believe such is natural order and just. Generations pass, surplus snowballs to buy more rights and freedom and enable more introspection, where colonialism can be acknowledged as stain, but on the margins. West rarely acknowledge that often the fine line between able to experiment vs subsist is funded by foreign extractive surplus. Skewing global balance sheet of energy and resources enable building and experimenting and bribing peripheries, liberalism = luxury experiments derivative product of colonial surplus. We see how fast it erodes when physical resources contracts. Regardless, when looting from another, the geopolitical balance sheet no longer remains domestic, like America, it starts geopolitical debts that likely can't be default without eventual consequence. Mistreated countries have long memories, and being mistreated, humiliated if you will (and we're not talking bout only PRC), those memories do not tend to soften with time, and can really only repaid in catharsis. AKA there maybe a day when global south develops/catches up and coerce the west pay their debts. It could be 100s of years from now or current events could hint interregnum where power shifts and debts are soon collected.
wbronitsky 8mo ago
I think parsing out what kind of freedom would help here. The US has a lot of “freedom of” but not a lot of “freedom from.”
- threethirtytwo 8mo ago
  Any freedom. For example you don't have the freedom to own guns in China.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bmitc 8mo ago
    Who cares?
    - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
      Exactly. I don't care about owning guns. I don't care about the overwhelming majority of the freedoms the US provides to me for which China does not provide.
  - tclancy 8mo ago
    Is that a freedom? You're defining everything as though the US were the optimal model of society. Couldn't I just as easily define the freedom to be safe from guns?
    - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
      What? I'm defining China, a country with less freedoms, AS more optimal then the US. I think that comment about guns threw everyone off. People are very liberal on HN and at the same time very patriotic. They support gun control and ironically more freedoms at the same time so I think you and the other guy didn't realize that you both support China's lack of freedom in the aspect of owning guns.
    - mixmastamyk 8mo ago
elmomle 8mo ago
It's not a linear relationship where you trade one for the other. You don't just get a more competent government by giving up freedoms.
- threethirtytwo 8mo ago
  There is a relationship here. It is not a perfect one, but it is real, and pretending otherwise just avoids the tradeoff. Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory. The result is predictable. I will never see a functioning high speed rail system in California in my lifetime. Neither will anyone alive today. Not because we lack money or engineering talent, but because the accumulation of individual rights makes collective action nearly impossible. Now look at China. They decide to build it, and it gets built. If you are in the way, you move. If persuasion fails, coercion follows. Freedoms are not part of the equation. That contrast is uncomfortable, but it is real. Freedom buys dignity and protection from abuse. It also buys paralysis. China sacrifices individual rights and gets infrastructure. California preserves individual rights and gets endless meetings, delays, and nothing on the ground. You can argue which system is morally superior. You cannot argue that they produce the same outcomes.
  - macintux 8mo ago
    Autocracy can (and perhaps usually does) produce corruption, and there's no guarantee that progress will be beneficial. I agree there are tradeoffs, but it's worth pointing out that sacrificing freedom does not reliably produce useful results.
  - angled 8mo ago
    But what of the culture? For years now the art and music has felt like poor cousins to what is in the west, similar to what we see generated by AI now, and consumed be people doomscrolling on WeChat moments while they wait for their didi to deliver their food from the shop down the street. Every time I visit SZ now it feels like the scooters are misrouted neurons firing in any which direction, with no respect for pedestrians, parking, or the rest of the city.
CodingJeebus 8mo ago
This is one of the most insane things I’ve ever read on this forum. The assertion that being able to summarily execute people you accuse of corruption somehow reduces corruption is absurd. If that were true, places like Russia would have no corruption. Being a dictator just ensures that corruption flows your way as the leader.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- threethirtytwo 8mo ago
  Calling something “insane” is not an argument. It is a way to terminate a line of reasoning before it forces you to confront tradeoffs you would rather not look at. Once you label a position as madness, you no longer have to examine whether it explains real outcomes in the world. That move shortens the discussion, but it does not strengthen your position. You are also arguing against a claim that was not made. No one is saying that executions somehow purify human nature or permanently eliminate corruption. The claim is narrower, colder, and more uncomfortable: extreme enforcement can sharply reduce certain forms of corruption for long periods of time, and that reduction can produce real, measurable benefits that save lives at scale. This is not theoretical. Take food safety. In China, officials and executives have been executed for large scale food adulteration scandals. Morally, that is horrifying. Practically, it created an environment where cutting corners suddenly carried catastrophic personal risk. The result was a rapid tightening of compliance in industries where negligence or fraud can poison millions. Fewer tainted products means fewer dead children. That tradeoff does not become imaginary just because it makes us uneasy. The same logic applies to infrastructure. When corruption in construction is treated as a capital crime, bridges do not collapse as often. Buildings are less likely to be built with fraudulent materials. Rail systems are less likely to be sabotaged by kickbacks and subcontracting fraud. One execution looks monstrous in isolation. The thousands of lives not lost to structural failure rarely make headlines because they never happened. Singapore offers a milder but still illustrative example. It did not rely on executions, but it imposed severe, credible punishment and relentless enforcement for corruption. The outcome is one of the least corrupt governments on the planet and a state that functions with extraordinary efficiency. The lesson is not that brutality is good. The lesson is that consequences matter, and when they are weak, delayed, or politically negotiable, corruption flourishes. Russia is not the counterexample you think it is. Corruption there thrives precisely because enforcement is selective and loyalty based. Power protects insiders rather than disciplines them. That is not what happens in systems where even high ranking officials can be credibly destroyed for crossing certain lines. Treating all authoritarian systems as identical collapses meaningful distinctions into a slogan. You are framing this as a moral debate because morality is the easiest place to win rhetorically. Summary execution is evil. Everyone agrees. End of discussion. But that does not answer the structural question of why some societies manage to enforce standards at scale while others drown in fraud, decay, and institutional rot. The world does not offer clean choices. Every system kills people, just in different ways. One system kills visibly, deliberately, and brutally. Another kills slowly through negligence, corruption, drug tainted streets, collapsing infrastructure, and the quiet abandonment of public order. One death looks shocking. Ten thousand avoided deaths look like nothing at all. If you refuse to engage with that reality, you are not taking the moral high ground. You are opting out of the analysis entirely. And calling that insanity does not make it go away. It just signals an unwillingness to sit in the grey zone where cause, effect, and moral cost actually live.
mbivert 8mo ago
> Less corruption there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then: 1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason 2. there's corruption > Less incompetency one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally. furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners. I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority. > Less freedom for stuff like protesting this is a watered-down description of the actual situation. you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means. [0]: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/investigations-into-top-military-leadership-mark-a-new-phase-in-chinas-anti-corruption-campaign/ https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/investigations-in... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
- bmitc 8mo ago
  > one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally. Is that true?
  - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
    Not strictly true. There's more of a tendency for this to be true-ish.
- threethirtytwo 8mo ago
  >there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then: >1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason >2. there's corruption > Less incompetency You're just compressing reality so the logic becomes simple. But your analysis loses the nuance. First of all no one said there's no corruption in China. Corruption is everywhere... saying there's none is a practical impossibility. Second. In 2025 983,000 people received disciplinary sanctions.... If what China claims is true or even partially true it means corruption was reduced on a scale that cannot be replicated in the US. You analysis is valid, but inconclusive. >furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners. >I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority. First of all let me be frank. I am asian. I am genetically Chinese and culturally western. My comment was purely about centralized systems of government and how THAT effects competency and not at all about the competency of the population seperate from that. That being said, average IQ in China is higher than the US, that is a statistical fact. I did not comment on how that translates into this argument or what IQ even means in reality. I'm going to avoid that argument because I have no opinion on it. >this is a watered-down description of the actual situation. >you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means. You're right. I did water it down. But I still stand by my point. I won't in actuality participate in activities that will lead to these types of consequences so restricting me of these freedoms is something I practically don't care about. The religious argument is valid. But what do you think of scientology? Cults. Basically the religions that China cracks down on are religions it considers to be similar to scientology. Ultimately these things are bullshit. I'm not religious so, again practically speaking it doesn't affect me. I think most HNers are also atheist or agnostic.

verdverm 8mo ago

spite of one man child

bmitc 8mo ago
The sad truth is that it's millions of people. These people just want to see the world burn due to nothing but narcissism and hate of the imaginary "other side".
- PaulHoule 8mo ago
  There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.
  - jfengel 8mo ago
    That's how parties work, of necessity. They are all uneasy alliances of people who can barely tolerate each other. People find the one that supports their most important issues and hopefully few things they really detest. Then they have to pay at least lip service to all of it. By getting everyone else's support, at least one or two of your favorite issues get worked on. In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
    - CrossVR 8mo ago
      > That's how two party systems work Fixed that for you. There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.