Pinning any change here on trump is like blaming the crash on a pilot who took charge after the engines already blew. There is little to no recognition of the abuses of federal government in the government itself, and not for a while.
If any authoritarian power rises, it will be because the democrats are too busy shoveling their shit out of view to put up any real fight. Just look at how blame for a mediocre-at-best platform was shifted to russian propaganda, as if it could have possibly moved the needle more than the hundreds of millions of “legit” propaganda spent by the democrats, as if Bernie Sander's continued popularity doesn't point to a way to strong support in the future that they continue to reject for more unpopular, centrist, neoliberals.
So, do what about Xi exactly? Nothing. There's absolutely nothing Trump or Obama could or would be able to do about Xi's power grab. Obama would have issued a PR about concerns of this or that, and it would have been meaningless in actuality (other than making a small number of people feel slightly better for a minute).
China has been authoritarian-heavy in one form or another for most of the last 300 years or so of modern history. Smacking them on the nose about it isn't going to accomplish much. It'll work about as well as it has with Russia over the prior century.
All of the surrounding nations would agree with your accusation of authoritarian tendencies from China and would eagerly align themselves with each other and the US in order to level the playing field between them and China.
Another thing that could be done is to shame them on the international stage into adopting policies that restrict their ability to pollute, and subsequently slow their growth.
The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy. It's believed that people with freedom and opportunity become vibrant trade partners and allies, not enemies in war. Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
That historic policy is widely believed to have given the US enormous influence, as people generally feel favorably towards others whose central goal is freedom and opportunity for all.
The current State Dept (including the Secretary of State) and other leading government officials have openly forewarn support for human rights. The Secretary of State said making money is more important (which fits the approach of many in the oil industry, and he was CEO of Exxon). Others deemphasize it for no given reason, and advocate even eliminating the State Dept in favor of military power.
> a continuation of politics that hardly offered Obama straightforward leverage
A lack of straightforward leverage is pretty normal for international relations; it's the sea in which diplomats swim. Almost every great thing that has been accomplished in that field was done in that environment.
Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent.
> Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim (the relative rarity of democracy-on-democracy war does not require any more than the small proportion of potential historical pairs of nations that consist of two democratic nations to explain it.)
> Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent.
Agreed, but the results are incredible on the scale of human history. Under Pax Americana, look at the amazing spread of liberty and democracy, and of prosperity, to people worldwide.
But yes, more should have been done. Too often the U.S. sacrificed others, on large scales, to narrow interests.
>> Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
> There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim
It's hard to prove a negative through evidence, but can you cite and exception? And looking at the obverse, progress in international peace and cooperation, have non-democracies ever achieved anything like the EU or NATO? Remember Europe before democracy.
No, it's not, in the usual scientific sense of proof rather than some absolutist one; you show the expected incidence of the inhibitory effect did not exist, and then show that the actual value (either by surveying the whole universe of concern or a random subset) is below that expected value to a degree that makes it improbable that it occurs by chance, while controling for other known sources of variability.
> but can you cite and exception?
Sure, if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow that the expected number of wars if democracies on both sides isn't far less than one, you will also find lots of actual wars between Democracies. Even if you ignore wars where the only pair of democracies are a separatist group and the unit they are separating from (e.g., the American Revolution), there are plenty (War of 1812, for instance, or more recently some parts of the Yugoslav Wars.)
Wikipedia has more discussion and examples:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_between_democra...
> have non-democracies ever achieved anything like the EU or NATO?
Yes, non-democracies have created both continent-spanning multi-national supergovernments like the EU and wide regional military alliances like NATO.
In fact, they did both long before democracies did.
> if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow ...
The word has a meaning; these aren't narrow definitions any more than saying 'Manchester United isn't a basketball team' depends on how narrow your definition is of 'basketball'.
At what point precisely did the Westminster system, one of the more common models of modern democracy, become a democracy?
Note that the later you peg and the more narrowly you define “democracy” to justify it, the more you make the case that there have been so few democracies that, given the actual historicsl frequency of interstate wars and the number of nations available at any time, the number of wars expected to have a democracy on either side is expected to be near zero even if democracy in both sides of a dyad does nothing to decrease the probability of war between the countries.
(Also note if you claim it's not a democracy because it had territories unrepresented in the national government despite the form of government being democratic, that has the same effect—and even rules out the modern US as a democracy, as well.)
The facts differ from your claims. All you need to do is look at history, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Kennedy to Reagan to Bush Jr to Obama and everyone in between. All embraced these things and acted on them.
The current nationalists want to paint it as idealistic, but in fact it has been the mainstream - and very effective - for generations.
The comment adds no knowledge to the discussion - I'm no wiser after reading it - and is inflammatory, risking further derailment of the discussion. Mostly it communicates the emotional state of the commenter, in regard to this issue, when the comment was written.
There are times and places to do that, but they are very common and we also need the other kind of interaction: A very important problem is how to have substantive, valuable discussion of public affairs, and I'm searching for a solution.
Under Trump it feels like those same people mostly gave up.
The machine that has been consistently moving these things along for 40-50 years now, transcends the parties. The parties have their marching orders, they largely obey. Politicians come and go. Feinstein for one example, if she gets replaced (which she will eventually, she's 84 years old), the anti-privacy pushers will find a replacement vessel.
Who are we to change anything about china? Talk about hubris. Considering the horrors and war crimes we committed against china for 150 years, I don't think china is interested on our input.
> After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China
That's as silly as a chinese person saying after reading about the native american "concentrations", they need to take a stand.
> I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.
Your friends? If the government is "terrorizing" your friends, what are they doing in china?
Get off your high horse. We aren't the world police and we certainly aren't saints. Pretending we are "moral" while destabilizing countries and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people is rather hypocritical.
Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow.
People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.
A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.
sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“
“’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :(”
Try a few decades.
> People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow.
Goodness.
> Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
You mean the website full of russian, chinese, european and american propagandists where you can't take anything seriously? Where anyone can pretend to be anything and lie all day long? Did you write that reddit comment?
> sorry my English sucks
Going through your comment history, your english is fine. I don't know why you are pretending and faking as if your english sucks.
> I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese,
I thought native chinese couldn't speak? "People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. "
> I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.
Is this for real? Are you gordon chang?
I think the name of the company is highly apt.
The ring was created by Sauron and embedded most of his life-force, and nobody alive at the time of the LotR had enough strength to resist his will.
A fun thought invoked by this, and given Tolkien's intent to create a creation myth for our Earth, is somewhere out there Tom still sits in his forest, waiting, for when the might of the Valar fades. Feels almost Lovecraftian.
"Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific"
/s
Personally I think Tom is one of the most important moments of the book, but not as part of the plot; rather, it's fascinating to somebody who considers the LoTR as an archetypal myth, because Tom's identity is intentionally kept mysterious, even when his powers are not.
Well, stuff happens; thanks.
What would be new would be formal preemptive detention by generic factors. Then again there was news covered by the Guardian on a police black site in Chicago that held thousands of largely black detainees without lawyers.
Agreed, but technology changes everything (otherwise, what are we all doing?). Transporting goods by boat is thousands of years old (or probably more), but modern shipping has a completely different impact than millennia of wooden wind- and human-powered boats.
Surveillance is old; modern data collection and analysis is a whole different animal.
Same for someone who want to purchase large quality of fertilizer for no real needs.
This is all very fine to want, but it's an entirely different conception of government than the one described in the constitution. It's a government much closer to the one in Russia, or China, or Turkey, or North Korea. While it may be used to, in part, fight crime, the line item that justifies the surveillance state is the ability to invest in a guarantee of power.
Trying to turn the US into this state is just going to lead to abuse of power, abuse of people without voices, and a much more wasteful budget: infrastructure spending by investment in paranoia, with a return of more power by fear. Literally government by terrorism.
While I'm sympathetic to your point, it can be taken too far. Government does provide security to its citizens, and it does that partly by gaining prior intelligence about suspicious activities. Some things should be investigated - if someone posted online about committing murder, in detail and with clear plans, I'd hope law enforcement would check it out.
When you look at successful police operations that have prevented terrorism, a lot of it comes down to luck. Someone had an informant who heard someone say something about a bomb.
There just simply aren't enough police in the US to follow-up on every suspicious activity. Particularly now when even mundane activities can be regarded as suspicious.
There is just another form of extrajudicial population control. They are using this as a way to justify arbitrarily rounding up people who have long wanted to be free of Chinese rule.
Fortunately we have something called Habeas Corpus
Habeas corpus after 9/11 is not what it used to be. ACLU has been fighting several cases of clear violations.
Compare that to China, where your best hope is you know someone in power who can try and put in a good word for you. I couldn't imagine living in a system like that where the juggernaut of gov't power is effectively unstoppable.
The notion of enemy is now in the US criminal law. The President of the United States has now the power to designate either US citizens for foreign citizens as enemy. The way it's defined includes not just combatants, but also "persons who are engaged in conflict against the USA" in general level. Expressing solidarity is enough.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...