Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

Absolutely agree, it's time for American video games to stop publishing in China. It's not worth the Chinese influence on our society.

American video games? What about American companies that have factories there or other presence there? Hello Apple! Hello Tesla! Hello Google.

Blizzard has been bending over backwards for some time with regards to China but this is the first time I remember them taking action against someone who does not work for them.

the simple matter is, you cannot pick and choose, all the companies must be shamed into not bending to China's censorship because it won't be long before such actions suddenly show in law; not that some of the speech regulations in the EU aren't close as it is with regards to what you can and cannot say with regards to religions

What factories?

Everyone already has or currently is moving manufacturing operations from China to Viet Nam or India.

5 more years and the only factories China will have are going to be domestic.

If we're going to repeat the same cycle with Vietnam and India, we'd do well to encourage democracy this go-around.

If we elevate authoritarian countries to our level, democracy may be in for a rough future.

We should be learning a lot from the China situation. Modern China proves that authoritarian capitalism works and that you don't need freedom or liberty for your citizens. And that's incredibly scary.

Imagine if that meme spreads to democratic countries...

We need to be handling this situation with urgency. As bad and as pressing an issue as climate change is, this is much more terrifying.

> Modern China proves that authoritarian capitalism works

For some definition of "works". China has recently (2017) became richer than Brazil, what is a feat, but well, Brazil isn't a liberal democratic paradise and whatever democracy we have is very recent.

All the stable democratic countries are much richer than China.

> All the stable democratic countries are much richer than China.

They had a substantial headstart, China is really only about two decades into this, and they're just getting warmed up. If things continue more or less along the same path, and I see little to expect otherwise (China only gets stronger, it's citizens more allegiant) Let's see where they are 10, 20 years from now. Especially now that they are actively exploiting one of the West's biggest Achilles heels: our unique combination of greed + the sense of individual freedom + corporate control of the economy. China is demonstrating how easily they can control Western corporations, and in turn individual people. What percentage of the American public works for a corporation with interests in China? This control may not be that sophisticated yet, but give them some time.

And what plausible recourse do we have?

- Government sanctions? The trade abuses were far more obvious than this, and look what a shitstorm of half-informed but hyper-emotional arguing that turned into.

- Corporations recognizing they are strategically putting themselves into a situation that threatens their long term existence, or, thinking beyond a 5 year window? It seems unlikely.

- Western society collectively recognizing there is a genuine existential threat and banding together to do something about it? We can't even get people on forums to even remotely agree, so seems unlikely.

It's going to take time, but my hunch is this capability will be a big part of China's eventual checkmate on the West. And all executed within a timeframe of < 50 years. History in the making.

You are speculating the phenomenon will go on for long, on a thread about how China is proof that the phenomenon can go on for long. Speculation is not proof.

Indeed I am speculating (honestly, was that not obvious?), as is everyone else. The difference I would say, is that I clearly realize I am speculating. I am making a bold and provocative prediction of future doom for the West, with the naive intention of shocking some people out of their sleepwalk of unconsciousness.

I would argue HN has one of the highest concentrations of informed logical minds in existence, yet go into any thread on HN on any topic of this general nature, and marvel at the inability of people to even remotely agree upon what the facts are that we're dealing with. Now imagine the general public, and our comically theatrical political system, somehow coming up with remotely optimal solutions to deal with the massively complex issues modern existence is forcing upon us (China is but one). If we can't even have reasonable conversations here, I speculate that it will always be far worse in our broad political and social spheres.

The long term risks (risks are always potentials) of the rise of China should have been clear to any logical and informed person for many years, but it's really just the last year or so that this idea has started to creep into the mainstream discussion. Remember how Trump's trade concerns were utterly mocked in the media and on forums like this at the start ("Trump thinks trade is a zero sum game, hahahaha what an idiot!!"), until magically something changed and the media simultaneously all got onto a different page.

We often hear how the American military has numerous scenarios & reactionary plans planned out "just in case", and the typical reaction to that tends to be "but of course, it's only logical". How likely does it seem that no one in past administrations were considering and planning for the possibility that democracy wouldn't magically bloom in China once they became wealthy? And yet, are there any signs that there were, or conversation among the serious political talking heads (whoever that might be)? Is this incompetence, or something else? No one knows, we can only speculate, but we seem to be not even doing that. Too conspiratorial.

I speculate that time is not just ticking, but accelerating. Each day China becomes richer, extends their sphere of influence, moves further up the technology chain, becomes ever more clever at global propaganda and skilled in exploiting the many obvious weaknesses in the Western system, and in Western minds. And they are moving fast, way faster than democracies could hope to even when they are operating at their very maximum efficiency. I speculate that an intelligent (yes, easier said than done, but this idea that only democracies can be successful is a meme, not a fact), authoritarian state will beat out a democracy every time, in the aggregate (which is what matters in such situations). Add in all their other advantages: 4x the population of any other single powerful state, a nearly completely ideologically aligned populace (as compared to our incredibly emotionally polarized populations), media/government/educational/corporate organizations of your "opponents" operating propaganda campaigns (to some degree) in your favor, the eye of the tiger, and so forth and so on.

Honestly, I simply don't see how China loses, short of some sort of unexpected shock to their system. I speculate that modern Western civilization is literally unable to counter this threat, short of military conflict. We would have to fix so many fundamentally broken things in our systems and thinking, and fast, to even hope to be able to compete. That seems incredibly unlikely to me. But hey, this is all speculation, maybe the wildly popular meme-based Pollyanna predictions will actually turn out to be correct after all. I am perfectly happy to consider that possibility. But I suspect very few are willing and able to even consider the possibility that my less optimistic predictions might turn out to be right. Rather, I speculate that the very reading of ideas such as this will provoke a very strong emotional reaction and an immediate, extremely confident mindset that this person is wrong, self-evidently and to such a degree that no counter reasoning is even necessary. This behavior is one of the broken things I refer to, by the way: emotions completely overpowering rationality, very often in even the most rational of Western minds as is the norm here on HN. I speculate that we have largely lost the ability to even think clearly (particularly on topics of a particular kind) at the individual level, let alone at the collective level.

Something could be done about this, and HN in theory seems like one of the better places on the planet to start, but for the above stated reasons I suspect it would be passionately and overwhelmingly opposed. That the genuinely intelligent refuse to think is perhaps the primary reason I see no hope.