At the same time, as the US withdraws from the world, China fills in. They zealously sell the surveillance state and its equipment world wide just as the US exported its form of capital constrained democracy. So it's not remotely just CBS nor just in the US.
For those annoyed by the occasionally harmful American hegemony, just wait till you see what China is going to do.
There are plenty of abuses to call out on all sides, but let's not resort to euphemisms when comparing the historical abuses [1] of one side to future abuses from another. It's a great disservice to all those who have been just "occasionally harmed" (I'm sure they don't feel the same way as you do).
[1] https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...
My comment was simply stating that the past abuses of one side should not be compared to future, hypothetical abuses of the other (referring to the sentence "just wait till you see what China is going to do").
One may compare the historical abuses of one side to the historical abuses of the other.
Is that fair and reasonable?
It is hard to believe you didn't understand this phrase, but just in case I'll explain. It means "if China had been the dominating power to the measure the US is, their abuses would be much more massive than whatever abuses US has done or is accused of. And if China will achieve such dominant position, we will have the misfortune of experiencing this abuse". The validity of this statement can be confirmed by looking into past and present abuses by Chinese government, and concluding that if that government becomes as powerful and dominant as US government is now, it's lust for human rights abuses is not likely to diminish.
Thus, we are not comparing present to the future. We are comparing the level of dominance and level of abusiveness at the same level of dominance, while assuming that more dominance would allow the government to be more abusive to more people.
I understood the phrase completely. The OP's original sentence is very unambiguous. My interpretation, or re-phrasing of it is:
> If you think America is bad right now, wait till you see what China is going to do in the future.
It's a very clear comparison of America's present abuses to China's future potential ones. As I have said many times already, that is not a fair comparison. One can compare America's past or present abuses to China's past or present abuses. One cannot make a comparison based on future abuses, unless one is a time traveller or has possession of a crystal ball. I'm actually very surprised that this is such a point of contention.
> The validity of this statement can be confirmed by looking into past and present abuses by Chinese government, and concluding that if that government becomes as powerful and dominant as US government is now, it's lust for human rights abuses is not likely to diminish.
> We are comparing the level of dominance and level of abusiveness at the same level of dominance, while assuming that more dominance would allow the government to be more abusive to more people.
I'm not sure that the OP speaks with the same voice as you do. Regardless, to repeat the point again, you are condemning China for future, hypothetical abuses it will possibly carry out as a possible future world hegemon based on past and present actions.
The assumption is invalid because they are based on the premise that countries are static and do not evolve over time. You're saying because a country has done X and is doing Y, it will continue to do so in the future. History trivially shows this to be untrue. If you follow that train of thought, there will never be enough countries in the world for you to condemn.
Anyways, I feel like this conversation is not very productive and we're not supposed to engage in political battles, so I will end this thread here.
No, you didn't. I assume English is not your native tongue (it's ok, it's not mine either), but after I explained it to you I don't think it makes sense to keep purposefully misunderstanding it.
> you are condemning China for future, hypothetical abuses it will possibly carry out as a possible future world hegemon based on past and present actions.
Nope. I am condemning China for past and present abuse, and tell you that if China had chance to dominate, this abuse would increase orders of magnitude. Exactly because China is abusive right now. It's not some hypothetical guess about the future, it's the fact. Just as I can predict what happens if I drop a stone - it will fall to the ground, due to gravity, and the laws of gravity is not something hypothetical in the future - it has been long established and this is what allows me to make predictions - I can also predict what would happen with China exactly because I know present and past of China. You are trying to pretend it's some play of imagination that has no connection to facts. It is the opposite.
> You're saying because a country has done X and is doing Y, it will continue to do so in the future. History trivially shows this to be untrue
If history trivially shows that, it wouldn't be hard for you to show three examples of totalitarian states that voluntarily stopped being totalitarian while their dominance was on the raise.
But I think that hypothetical, to the degree any hypothetical can be, is fairly valid. For example, at this moment, one side supports North Korea the other South Korea.
So no, in my books that's just suicidal playing for time I have no patience for and will take no part in.
I'm 100% onboard with this notion.
Our opinions differ only with respect to where we think China is headed, which was the premise of my original comment. Yours is the pessimistic view, mine is the optimistic one.
I happen to believe that as China continues to modernize, it will reach a point where its government will no longer feel the need to resort to totalitarian policies to ensure the stability and prosperity of its society. You and many others will disagree.
The point is, we won't know until we're actually there.
Do you have an example from history of a totalitarian society voluntarily undergoing such transformation?
Much of that list predates 1945. You can also exclude any internal repression when considering the effects of US hegemony, which is experienced only by people outside the US.
There's still a LOT to account for. Vietnam and Iraq being the two biggest.
But, on the other hand, 70 years, a couple hundred total countries. When you average it out, "occasionally harmful" isn't inconsistent with reality. It's consistent with a lot of interventions in a lot of places over that timeframe.
On your other point, I respectfully disagree.
My sense is that being a hegemon seems to involve such harms and interventions, and the US hegemony was especially vast. So I'm viewing things in terms of that scale.
(If a non-hegemon had done that list, they would be public enemy number 1)
Several odd examples fill out that list. A handful of individuals wrongfully incarcerated out a system of millions, when other states don't even have a semblance of due process.
The fire-bombing of Dresden was awful. But the alternative was, what, permit the holocaust? Acquiesce to an increasing tempo of rockets raining on London from an unchallenged Germany? It was an era where every state was engaged in total war and no one found a way to engage in that fight for survival with clean hands. If there was even a hundredth of a percent chance Dresden would have broken the will of Germany and halted the internal genocide and outward aggression, it could have easily been worth it.
Then that bit is accompanied by criticisms of more modern targeted strikes. By their very design, those are an attempt to limit civilian casualties, especially compared to past weapons that inflict devastation at scale. Concern about Dresden and Hiroshima produces the smart bomb and the drone, it is a straight line. So that leaves, what exactly as the moral recommendation here? Radical pacifism and turning a blind eye to genocides?
A useful question for gauging atrocities is intent. A thought experiment is, if there was a device with a button that could instantly kill every civilian in the territory you're at war with, would the government press it? If they had a separate magic button that would reduce the harms of their actions, would they press it?
Those are hypotheticals, but we actually have evidence to get at intent, and compare the US to other actors in similar situations.
The US has spent billions on technologies and plans to reduce the impact of conflict on civilian populations. It has stayed on when, without the US presence, that population is being indiscriminately murdered at a rate of thousands per month: https://www.statista.com/statistics/202861/number-of-deaths-... Or before involvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein...
In contrast, the Russian approach to war in the middle east featured total war in Afghanistan, killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians with the explicit goal of systematic depopulation. This included raping women, deploying chemical weapons, and scorched earth tactics to prevent the return of refugees, all to break the will of the people writ large, not just combatants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War#Atrocities
Terrorists, dictators, Russians. In contrast to that rogues gallery, actively trying to decimate civilian populations, the US seems like the only power that's ever been in the region with any interest in actually preserving civilian lives.
And this wasn't just the historical Soviet Union. Moscow continues to support these tactics by a Russian proxy in Syria and, to no one's surprise, have once again created one of the largest humanitarian / refugee crises the world has ever seen, one which is destablizing European politics (so a double win for Putin?). The impact of these different approaches to foreign policy and conflict is night and day. Go back to the statista chart. One approach reduces local casualties when there's a heightened presence. The other expands a conflict into a global humanitarian crisis.
If the Americans had a tool to reduce the harms while achieving their objectives, no doubt they would use it. Not a question.
Meanwhile, if the Chinese had a magic button that would promote human rights by allowing their citizens to actually, say, discuss politics with one another? They literally have that capacity right now and have chosen not to use it! They could turn off the great firewall tomorrow!
The most extreme authoritarian basket-cases of the world, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, China, all have the Soviets to thank for providing a model of inhumane totalitarian oppression. Some of those aligned with the US, like South Korea and Chile, went through some genuinely awful political dynamics in order to prevent becoming Communist themselves, but have emerged as some of the most stable, prosperous, and politically free countries in the world.
In the long run, do you want to tally individual incidents which had admittedly serious impacts on individuals, but were nontheless incidental as part of a system that reduced human rights violations overall? Or do you want to take a hard look at totalitarian states that support systemic deprivation of human rights as a core component of their being? No one is saying any state power is harmless, especially when it uses military power to confront inhumanity. But if you want to improve human rights, there's much lower hanging fruit than cherry picking examples taken out of context of larger geopolitical issues.
That's true right now, over the last century, and probably will be into the next.
i.e. does China's investment and push towards a controlled society actually come out ahead compared to if they didn't?
Without looking at any figures, surely policing the internet, building large re-education camps, and employing a whole lot of social police gobbles up a lot of resources. The people employed could be doing something else productive right?
So would the safety gained from their extreme surveillance state increase over all productivity due to less violence or lower productivity because the net gain from a safer society is less than what would be gained if the resources were distributed to other societal needs like healthcare and infrastructure?
Most folks that have any opinion on humanitarian or privacy social issues would probably be unwilling to entertain the idea of cost/benefit analysis with regards to whether or not concentration camps (no, not 're-education' camps) provide a societal good.
The same question people used to ask about USSR. USSR had it all - mass prison camps, massive industrialization programs, surveillance and terror state (of course, at different technology level), massive successes in some areas - like space technologies, unconditional love of all well-meaning people in the West, especially in academy and significant part of Hollywood - everything was there. Until USSR crumbled into dust. Turns out enslaving and oppressing people under the slogans of "most free society on the planet" is, after all, not sustainable, and free economy (even the semi-free one we're witnessing now) outperforms the socialist planned one. I don't think China would fare much better - though it may take a long time to see it, and sometimes it would seem like they have won - as was proclaimed many times by USSR fans over the course of 20th century.
While many people have stopped believing this, it really is true that free economies outperform planned ones, and when the planned ones explode, they tend to explode spectacularly. The only mitigating counterpoint is that it's not clear how free the US and EU economies really are these days, as they've increasingly become dominated by large companies via market power, lobbying and regulatory capture.
Occasionally harmful? Hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the middle east in the past two decades isn't "occasionally harmful! China isn't even in the same league when it comes to the harm of US hegemony.
No need to pick one or the other. There's plenty of hegemony from both to go around:
"The Communist Chinese invasion in 1950 led to years of turmoil, that culminated in the complete overthrow of the Tibetan Government and the self-imposed exile of the Dalai Lama and 100,000 Tibetans in 1959.
Since that time over a million Tibetans have been killed. With the Chinese policy of resettlement of Chinese to Tibet, Tibetans have become a minority in their own country. Chinese is the official language. Compared to pre-1959 levels, only 1/20 monks are still allowed to practice, under the government's watch. Up to 6,000 monasteries and shrines have been destroyed. Famines have appeared for the first time in recorded history, natural resources are devastated, and wildlife depleted to extinction. Tibetan culture comes close to being eradicated there."
China is a horrible state led by a despot, but it doesn't have a history of invading and killing anywhere beyond what it's historically claimed to be part of itself.
So to most of the world, the US has always been the greater threat.
Indeed, there really is.
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...
[couldn't copy and paste an excerpt because it's far too long]
It's not just about what you do, it's about the outcome you expect and aim for.
Those stickers sold product!
even though that's basically what the entire internet 'black bar' campaign was about during the SOPA/PIPA crisis.[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
Same with the silly apology tour multiple companies did over merely including Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate countries from China...in a dropdown menu on their websites: https://www.businessinsider.com/zara-marriott-qantas-apologi...
It's almost becoming a new-normal, which is concerning.
You say it's silly, but I imagine if we had the internet during the civil war and some European company listed the United States as two separate items for North and South, that could very easily end up being a political issue and politicians might threaten repercussions over it. I don't actually think it's silly, whether I agree with it or not. It is lamentable because I'm not sure there's a "right" way for a company to handle it other than going where the money dictates until it's mostly settled politically (which may never happen).
You're just proving grand parent commenter's point.
Saying that capitalism motivates censorship is like saying that money is what causes theft and robbery. It's a meaningless statement based on conflating motivation in one specific case with motivation for a class of actions in general. Not to mention that you're also conflating an economic system with what most people would simply call greed.
To say otherwise would be to ignore the entire history of the gaming industry. We can argue about whether or not certain changes are good or not, but it is undeniable that companies modify their products for maximum profit which is at the core what capitalism is about.
If one version of the content appears on approved channels in China and another uncensored version can be seen via VPN, that certainly wouldn't make the government look good.
As far as Americans using China as a means to increase profits, that's capitalism working exactly the way it was designed, unfortunately. The stock market doesn't care who was best-behaved last quarter, the market cares who made the most money last quarter. Our system is woefully incapable of factoring behavior and ethics into the equation.
Private corporations, public corporations that are still founder-controlled, and “public-benefit” corporations might be immune to this effect, but your average traded C-Corp or S-Corp won’t be.
If.