Agreed. The number of times the article specifically calls out "shady Chinese knockoffs" is honestly, actually, racism. If there's evidence that Hims' drugs are harmful: Present it. The article doesn't. I know tons of people who have used Hims and companies like it, for a variety of things. I'm aware of no specific or general problems anyone has had with their medication.
That is not to say that Hims's drugs were unsafe, or that they even came from China to begin with. What I am saying, is that it's not racism to mention that Chinese products are, in fact, occasionally shady (of poor quality).
Sure; and a bunch of Phillips (a European company) CPAP machines (which had received full FDA clearance) killed over 500 people [1]. The J&J COVID vaccine gave over 100 people GBS [2]. We could go back to the 80s and pick on the Therac-25, which caused six incidents of severe radiation exposure or death [3]. And a thousand other examples in-between, of western made, FDA approved, vetted, and tested medicines or therapies that ended up killing people.
It would be stupid to believe that the FDA doesn't serve an important purpose. But, it would be equally daft to believe that even FDA-cleared products aren't, in fact, occasionally shady (of poor quality). It would be racist to believe that China is unique in the production of occasionally shady products; that the same things don't happen all the time in western manufacturing facilities.
> The number of times the article specifically calls out "shady Chinese knockoffs" is honestly, actually, racism.
Factually incorrect. A country is not a race. You cannot be racist against a country, by definition, and China in particular has a very well-documented pattern of making low-quality clones of products from other countries (often using IP stolen from those countries), so the concern is well-justified.
More generally, the use of "racism" as a response to well-justified concerns about products of a country is completely irredeemable. It's logically invalid, emotionally manipulative, breaks the HN guidelines, is blatantly anti-intellectual, and is mostly used as a propaganda technique by state actors. Please keep this drivel off of platforms like HN that are designed for intellectual curiosity.
It's interesting to consider why criticisms of China in particular are often interpreted as racism. No one makes the same accusation if you criticize America. Part of the explanation may be that China is much more ethnically homogenous: Han Chinese are 92% of the population. It seems that in the name of opposing racism, people are effectively rewarding China for being an ethnostate.
> It seems that in the name of opposing racism, people are effectively rewarding China for being an ethnostate.
My understanding of criticism of China (in particular - although I have also seen this effect with many other countries) being interpreted as racism is very different than the explanation that you provided, but that's too long to get into. Meanwhile, this is an extremely interesting second-order effect that you pointed out that I hadn't realized before. Thank you for pointing this out!
> It's interesting to consider why criticisms of China in particular are often interpreted as racism.
Astroturfing of the criticism of China = racism view is presumably a part of it. I don't consider investigating bot account networks to be a hobby of mine, so no, I don't think it's "interesting to consider."
Typically I would agree on the separation of nationality and race; but in the case of China its actually far more accurate to intrinsically tie the country and the race, given that this is the official position of the CCP.
No, it's factually not more accurate. The CCP's policies do not dictate reality, and the morally objectional ethnostate policy is both not actually the reality within China (given that about 9% of the population is not Han Chinese), and is not practiced by the majority of other nations/states in the world.
Most importantly, the author of the article is not based in China, or in any other nation that has an ethnostate policy, but in the US[1]. Therefore, even if you could make the argument that every person in China believes that states = races (which is clearly false), it still wouldn't apply to the author. Or, you know, almost anyone else on Hacker News.
So no, claiming that attacks on China are "racist" is still factually incorrect, and I really would hope that you'd invest the bare minimum of effort to verify that your claim is correct before throwing such an extreme accusation at someone.
