Please do not take HN threads into generic national flamewar. This is off topic and never ends well.

While I agree it probably never ends well, this is hardly off topic in this case.

I see your point. There's a subtle assumption in what I said that was probably unclear, so I'll try to explain.

Generic discussions, especially generic flamewars, lead to the same things being said over and over. These topics are important and people feel very strongly about them, and because their passions are so engaged, they stride into the threads with tried-and-true weapons (talking points, prepared statements, and so on) to smite their enemies with. The enemy responds in kind, and off into battle we go.

In addition to being violent by internet standards, such discussions are also predictable. That's where the point about off-topicness comes in. Predictability is what this site exists to avoid; its core value is intellectual curiosity (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and that lives at the opposite end of the topic spectrum. So when I say that an argument like this is off topic, I mean it's off topic for Hacker News as a whole, even if it's related to the story at hand.

Tons more explanation of this can be found via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants it.

A dinosaur can do a lot of damage as it falls, unfortunately.

The more that China enforces the social credit system, the less worried I am about competition from China. Stagnation is the end result.

The damage it can do in the meantime is incalculable.

I really blame China for the shift away from libertarian thinking and toward both right and left authoritarianism.

The old argument from libertarians was that freedom and modern prosperity are a package deal. Take away freedom and you get poverty, corruption, and stagnation.

That seemed mostly true until the Chinese "miracle." China seems to be proving that you can have prosperity without freedom or human rights. You can allow some amount of freedom in certain select areas, and that's all it takes.

That has in turn opened the door for a whole host of fundamental challenges to freedom and human rights in the West.

I tend to agree, but I’m not optimistic. Historically, the sort of liberal, open society we see in “the west” is an aberration. If there is a causal factor between liberal, open societies and prosperity, it doesn’t seem to be particularly critical. People like to point to the fall of the USSR and the endurance of its former enemies as evidence that these societies are inherently more likely to succeed, but looking farther back in history, I’m inclined to think that was an anomaly.

I’d very much like to be wrong, of course.

This is my worry too.