I think we have bigger fish to fry closer to home when it comes to preserving whatever versions of democracy we have. We’re not going to effectively fight China when we do so much business with them, and a war would be catastrophic. Meanwhile if you care about freedom and democracy, the (re-)rise of populism, and even fascism seems like something we are capable of fighting.

If we want to change China in the long term, we should probably get our own houses in order so that we can actually occupy the moral high ground. Sweden, Germany, Italy, France Austria, the UK, all have either slid hard to the Right, or have flirted with the likes of Marine Le Pen, Lega Nord, Alternative For Germany, and so on. Then you have Hungary and Poland going fully off the deep end, and oh yes, Trump. All in all our table is full before we pretend thst we have either the political will or leverage to make China change. We might even have to accept that the Chinese people more or less have to fight for change themselves, or not, because we’re too busy doing business with Beijing to worry about their concentration camps.

> If we want to change China in the long term, we should probably get our own houses in order so that we can actually occupy the moral high ground. Sweden, Germany, Italy, France Austria, the UK, all have either slid hard to the Right,

Do i read you correctly that you believe it is impossible to be moral and at the same time hold conservative views?

Only if you read neo-fascism/far-right populism and conservative as the same things, in which case I’d say... yes. I’d point out that by no means did I attempt to conflate those things with conservatism though. I think being moral and believing in smaller governments, gradual change, and other conservative ideas can be consistent with morality. I think that xenophobia, bigotry and a return to the worst ideologies of Europe’s recent past is not.

All in all, it might be helpful to quote me more fully, or not at all, since the fragment you chose is unhelpful taken out of context. I’d like to think that in context, what I meant was clear and hard to take in the sense you seem to want to frame it.

I did not mean to misrepresent your meaning. I think often a heated argumentation starts when people use the same words but have different interpretation of those words. For example, what "right" means. Here it seems you used "Right" to describe neo-fascism/far-right populism when at least me did not read it like that.

I believe this is the root cause of a lot of flame wars on social media.

That's an excellent observation. I find myself conflating 'right' with all the bad things mentioned above, even though I find myself (surprisingly) sympathetic to various elements of this 'right' when I take the time to reflect.

In fact, I've been trying to elaborate, then delete, then elaborate again, and ended up with this non-statement because I feel I can't really properly go into this without the end result causing problems with the 'left' that I mostly identify with. It's incredibly frustrating that even under a badly-managed pseudonym on some online 'forum' I feel inhibited to do so, but I do.

I think it would be good to find better words for the various clusters that exist these days. They'll still be imperfect, but man do we gotta lose the one-dimensional left-right divide...

Oh yes, I agree. We have to get better ourselves too. But having such a stark example in front of us perhaps can help concentrate minds. At least that's my hope.