This seems to suggest the populace is at fault, wanting and buying cheap gadgets no matter what the consequences are?
In truth, I think most people are simply unaware of the many problems caused both by consumerism, and the moral spinelessness of pretty much all large corporations and how that is brought about by market forces. Even in politics I'd say that there is, besides some malfeasance, also limited understanding of complicated issues. (Remember the congressman asking Zuckerberg how Facebook made any money?)
I'm sorry it came off that way, as I do not blame people for the propaganda of their government (U.S. or China).
I do absolutely believe that we shouldn't be able to off-shore environmental/worker's rights policies. If you want to sell something in California, it should be made with the same environmental standards that making it in California would require.
If they weren't struggling to get by on the wages they make, they could afford to be a little more picky about what they buy and how it's created.
Are you getting that because of this flag issue or is there more behind that? I would argue that Apple is, by far, the more ethical option.
From Apple's historically more oppressive stance against freedom of expression in their own wallet garden, and the recent actions against the HK protest movement ("legitimate" app ban, the present article), my opinion is that Apple is a less ethical choice than Android which is more permissive and respectful of user freedom.
I would love to see how you justify Apple's actions as "historically oppressive" when it comes to App Store rejections. Even the case that you specify in Hong Kong wasn't Apple's actions "against the HK protest movement". The App was rejected initially because it was thought to violate specific terms and it was appealed and approved within days. To try and frame that as Apple being morally or ethically deficient is really, really disingenuous.
The opposite side is that Apple is the only company that's not actively selling user data and/or using it against users. Android may be more permissive from a general standpoint but even that comes at the huge, huge cost of a lack of privacy and a completely lack of concern for personal freedom. Even from a security standpoint, I would argue that Google is less ethical simply because they don't act on nefarious actors that they know about. Being permissive isn't the same thing as being ethical.
On the other hand, it would be easier for at least some of these people to get by if having a large TV or this year's smartphone wasn't part of "getting by".
People are buying based on price, quality and for some products image.
The products purchased based on image can be shamed away. The other two cannot. No matter what some will buy the best quality and some the cheapest. Government can't help with the first but can control the second.
I believe this is one of the fundamental flaws and challenges of capitalism. Corporations are great usability wise because serve as an abstraction for accessing a product. You put some money in and you get a widget out, without having to worry or know about where that widget came from.
But the consequence of that is that you are insulated from all of the negative externalities involved in creating that widget. You just wanted some cheap eggs, and you didn't realize you were inadvertently causing chickens to be raised in inhumane factory settings. You wanted a bottle of water and you didn't realize it was being pumped out of a national park.
It's like using some really nice, convenient API and only discovering later that every time you called getFoo(), the backend went out and killed a kitten.
I didn't read GP's "others" as "populace". One reading would have the U.S. and other [governments] have given in to excessive demands of China.
Now the "devil" in the question doesn't necessarily have to be China. It could be Global Finance -- an abstraction which believe it or not is reasonably reducible to actual people and families, the fabled "1%" [sic].
I believe it's more appropriate to say that they sold their souls at 230 dollars per share.
I realize you are referencing something specific, but I wanted to make sure I got it correctly. Current TSLA share price?
China is extremely attractive to businesses because of its gigantic market. There are tons of cars to be sold in a country with over one billion people. Tons of phones. There are tons of chinese hotel guests, chinese search requests, etc.
I remember a NPR broadcast a few years ago (when the female ghost busters movie came out) about how movies have become less progressive because they are targeted at world audiences. I think a lot of Westerners feel weird about this, but I think getting involved in the politics is even a step further (especially when we're seeing an human rights violations).
[0] https://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s23e02-band-in-china
The US refuses to see China as a strategic threat, and only as a economic challenge. Australia is looking into getting 16-32 submarines ordered right now, to cover for future defense outcomes. Aus and the SEA middle powers are having talks about obtaining nukes simply to prevent them being used against the countries.
China is projected to grow to be double the size of the US's econony. China is willing to spend those benefits in the south China sea and on BRI. Make no mistake about the military of China. It is a concern. This is as big as power politics get.
Huh? The new Commandant of the Marine Corps has flat-out said it.[1] And he's not the first in the Pentagon to take China seriously.[2] And from [3]:
"Emblematic of this mistake was the roll-out of the Air-Sea Battle doctrine. First outlined in a then-classified memo in 2009, ASB became official doctrine in 2010. From the beginning, it was an effort to develop an operational doctrine for a possible military confrontation with China and then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates openly discussed the need to counter China’s growing military capabilities. The signal received in Beijing was the U.S. had hostile intentions toward China and was trying to contain it militarily. The result was that the entire pivot was seen by Beijing as part of a broader effort to encircle China."
[1]https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3031445/us...
[2]https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/15/a-novel-about-war-with-...
[3]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/01/23/commentary/w...
https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/manufacturing/china-d...
We live on a continent taken from a people by violence, betrayal, and disease -- some of it intentionally spread through government policies. Sorry, the average American are direct beneficiaries of the atrocities of the past. Some of us don't know or chose to ignore it.
Update: I didn't say this to justify terrible things people are doing. We can't play this game of "only the most moral of us can criticize". Something is immoral in and of itself, it doesn't matter who calls it out.
This is true for most humans alive in nearly all nation-states today. At some point in the linear chain of humanity that allows my existence today, atrocities were committed. Whether an ancient ancestor strangling a potential threat with their bare hands, or the nation-state I was born in acquiring land through militaristic expansion.
How can I, as a person, talk with my money to prevent this? How can Lockheed Martin, a corporation whose fiduciary obligation is to generate profit for its shareholders, prevent this? How can the US government, who benefits greatly from a prosperous diplomatic relationship with the Monarch, prevent this?
> not caving to them
Fundamentally what I am saying is these institutions are not "caving in" - they are doing what they are doing because, from an emotionless game-theoretical perspective, it is beneficial to the success and longevity of the institution.
Apple benefits from an increasingly strong business relationship (the new diplomacy of the multinational) with mainland China - not just for their supply chain, but also for their marketshare.
These benefits have cost. For US-KSA the cost is tens of thousands of Yemeni civilian lives; for Apple the cost is decreased mindshare of the sovereign nationstate of Taiwan.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/20/h...
With your personal money? You can't. Can you convince extremely wealthy people to spend their money in a way that will ultimately lose them money? Possible, but still losing odds.
See Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins for an example of what this fight looks like. (he was one of the guys who paved way for the original deals between the US and Saudi Arabia that you mention)
Or, for a far less conspiratorial take on the same phenomenon, read "Globalization and its Discontents" by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
In it you'll learn how institutions like the IMF treated open markets and no currency flow restrictions as a religion regardless of whether they made sense for the stage of development of the countries on which they imposed those as terms of their loans.
Stop buying goods that support these policies. Stop supporting politicians that support these policies. Stop patronizing companies that lobby for these things. Use apps like "Goods Unite Us" to find out where your money is going.
The only way to do anything as an individual is to vote with your wallet, your feet, and your actual vote. When that cumulative change affects the bottom line of these companies, they'll have no choice but to change.
This is a joke right?
It's also not our fault, infar as we didn't literally pull any triggers. We're probably still complicit to some degree, however, by our general lack of support for reparation actions.
I'm sure lots of tax money is wasted, or used for bad things, but also a lot of good as well. Roads, police (that keep the peace), firefighters, education, foreign aid, etc.
Here's a question for you: If the US were to collapse into anarchy, and there was suddenly a void in the world where the US military used to exist, do you think would there be more or fewer civilian/child deaths (in total, from other forces) and why?
Those are hardly the only two options.
However, now that the US exists, it does a lot of good for many, many people. As a first generation immigrant, I'm glad that I was able to come here, as I think conditions are much better than my country of origin.
That being said, am I complicit in everything bad that has happened here simply because I'm living here now? What amount of reparations are appropriate for me to give, considering neither I nor my ancestors likely had any involvement with any of those things.
Can any amount of money even make up for what happened?
It's insane. The Native American example was just the first one that came to my mind that demonstrates that the "average" American of today does indeed benefit from atrocities committed hundreds of years ago.
Though I don't think it's a boolean, "Well you did it, you made up for the damage your ancestors caused" situation, but more of a, "Well now we are better equipped than we were before to handle the fallout of the damage your ancestors caused". And it's not just money (though money does fund everything), there's a lot more that the US government could be doing for the Native American people. Am I a bad person for not doing more? No. Could I probably do a bit more to help? Yeah.
maybe not, but that is hardly a reason to do nothing instead
For the partisans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic (ever noticed that bananas are the cheapest fruit?)
It's completely reasonable for larger countries with different values to expect customization that comport to local markets. At the end of the day China isn't forcing Apple or any other companies to make changes in global markets.
You are missing my point. The fact that it is status quo is the scary part.
I do not accept that companies should be let off the hook for empowering and enriching oppressive reigns because of "local laws and customs". I do accept that companies should be let off the hook for destroying environments and ecosystems because of local laws and customs.
What should a country have to do for a person / corporation(group of people) to stop supporting it? I don't expect everyone to have the same answer, or even that my answer is better than another, but if you are in a privileged life-situation you should think of your personal line and decide if it has been crossed.
Trying to tie trade to morality is exactly why Chinese influence is increasing - they are ideologically agnostic when it comes to trade relationships. That's just the new competitive environment we're in. The alternative is withdrawal and decoupling at the cost of hundreds of billions in trade and feel good points for some people at best and a long-term national security concern by pushing Chinese tech independence and future competitiveness at worst. Current administration already wasted that card IMO.
I think your real question is what does the west have to do to contain Chinese ascent which many people think runs counter to Western interests. The answer is I don't know. Though I don't think bilateral trade belligerency helps or individual action in the west. Developing countries are looking to the China model because it looks like it works - conflating the good and the bad with necessary and sufficient. I think western influence would go a long way if they managed to solve the myriad of problems at home and offer and offer an appealing alternative. Other countries aren't stupid, they're look at what works / is working. Too many things in the west is broken right now.
I reckon Hong Kong is a speed bump. China could likely roll tanks in and slaughter thousands and the West would do little more than hold some important looking meetings and press conferences with Very Serious looks on their faces, before issuing some "demands" on China's behavior, that would be promptly forgotten. Western culture has become weak, we are ruled by false ideology, propaganda, and the almighty dollar. If you ask me, we deserve whatever it is we get.
All I know is that I'm glad the TPP is dead and I'll be happy if nobody with the last names Clinton or Bush ever sits in the White House again.
I say this as someone who leans more toward the 'woke' side of the present culture wars.
My understanding has been that the TPP was about opening China to further outsourcing of white collar work by regularizing IP law on paper (which the Chinese would just ignore of course). This would have allowed more paralegal, contract writing, engineering, and even things like radiology (X-ray and scan interpretation) to be outsourced, further gutting the US middle class and transferring more expertise to China. In other words it would have started the outsourcing of non-physical forms of service work and more lower-level intellectual labor. What would even be left of the US middle class after that?
You're right that it was corporate captured but the original goal was geopolitical.
Edit, cite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-16/best-b...
At the same time it's a good gauge for them to figure out what else they can do.
Start with "hey man don't show that one pic" and the company figures "it's one pic, whatever we're not really compromising our values".
A few more steps and then it seems less dramatic when it comes to "give us that information on that one user"... and so on.
Personally I would expect an external social credit score coming soon too. It doesn't have to be all encompassing like the social credit score, but good luck getting a job with a company who wants to work with China if you're on the list...
That has already happened. Only instead of handing over data on specific users upon request, Apple has simply handed over all iCloud data of all its (mainland) Chinese users to a government owned company:
EDIT: s/against/for/
The frog, in reality, just jumps out of the pot when the water gets too hot.
Empirically, slippery slopes have always been an extremely common way change is driven in mass social thinking. This has been formalized as the "Overton window": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Saying, "We're still three steps from my issue but this thing that, in and of itself I have no problem with, can't happen because it might lead to the thing I have a problem with." is not a valid argument.
To try and bring it back into focus, it's a real problem that this "one pic" isn't being shown. It's not a slippery slope conversation, because we're already at the thing I/we have a problem with. No need to argue the "this paves the way for worse things" because this is the worse thing! We're here!
If one would never hear about Taiwan, would we really "know" it exists?
It's a sort of reverse branding exercise. If you can reduce exposure as much as possible there's not going to be a lot of sentiment for supporting the cause. What would be of Palestine today without the exposure that has been directed at it.
I frequently come across, in America, people who are genuinely surprised that Taiwan is a sovereign state.
Without a clear territory under exclusive control, recognition from other governments, or independence from the mainland, what's so sovereign about it?
But isn’t there? Taiwan has borders and a military.
Yes, when people debate Taiwan’s sovereignty (for, independent foreign relations and a military, against, limited recognition) they understand the local context. That there is legitimate dispute with respect to its status is news to a surprising number of Americans.
Most countries have petty border disputes.
A famous country occupies territory in Cuba where it built a military prison. Cuba claims that the military presence is occupation of territory it rightfully owns. The famous country refuses to leave; it claims it only leases it based on a hundred-year-old document, and sends $4k checks yearly. Cuba denies, and refuses to cash the checks.
I saw you made a comment earlier that both countries say "China" on their passports missing the point of this whole conflict.
I think you should spend at least an hour reading about the history of this conflict (not through China's censored Internet).
Famous country also blacklisted Cuba from trade and uses the prison for illegal detentions. Talk about bullying.
Cuba started a war for independence. The US sunk their own ship, the USS Maine to get an excuse to go to war (according to the Northwoods document declassified in 1998). This kicks off the Spanish-American war where Teddy Roosevelt rises to prominence (the perhaps biggest point of note was the butchering of whole villages, mass rapes, and what were essentially concentration camps in the Philippines).
After liberating Cuba, the US government drafted the Platt Amendment as conditions for giving up the Cuban territory they had won from Spain. There were 7 conditions and one of those was the establishment of Guantanamo Bay. Fidel Castro and his chief gestapo butcher Che Guevara overthrow the previous government and then proceed to break most of the other conditions (though it could be argued that the US should have exercised article 3 and prevented the coup).
Cuba later argues that the Vienna convention on treaties overrules the previous agreement, but the Vienna convention is explicitly non-retroactive (and more to the point, agreements due to a war are by their very nature coercive). It could be argued that the US created an excuse for war isn't very savory and most Americans of the time would have opposed involvement if an honest case had been made (I agree with this). If they had not, it's most likely that Cuba would have remained a Spanish colony and that point is immaterial.
International law doesn't leave room for "pettiness" in this case. If the US were trying to pretend the Cuban government didn't exist and was trying to force non-US entities to comply with that non-reality, that go far beyond petty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_Naval_Base#Guan...
Instead, I think China does this sort of thing to control discourse and/or to send constant reminders that certain lines should not be crossed or there will be consequences.
Both are bad things, but they are different types of bad thing.
Often because it’s the only power some groups can exert on others (in this case China's gov to western companies) so they push it as far as they can into the realm of ridiculousness. Plus people get job promotions or feel-good emotions about "doing something".
Eventually you run out of legitimate things to ban so you expand the scope. Then you can start banning people who complain about bannings, which naturally generating groups with victim complexes warranting more bannings, etc.
This is not unique to China.
That means little. The US has de-facto diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and has made official commitments to its defense against threats (which realistically could only ever come from the PRC), such as selling it arms. The weirdness and official ambiguity here are driven by the PRC's sensitivities, and do not represent any real commitment to the PRC's position.
Obviously, at some point realpolitik caught up and they reversed their stance, though they continue to help Taiwan because... more realpolitik.
The only newsworthy thing is that China's a big enough market that it can compel vendors to comply.
We would never be like that.. I mean, we're better than them. We're number one.
Taiwan is the result of a civil war. No one says Americans are petty when they try to remove Confederate flags or when Germany bans the Nazi flag.
The PRC is the result of the civil war. The ROC never stopped existing nor did it start to exist as the result of the civil war.
How would we feel, in that world, if the US government wanted to censor people mentioning Florida? Of course there would be complicated questions about whether that censorship was ethical or helpful, and about the government's real motivations for proposing it. But I think it would be clear to everyone involved that "kindergarten levels of pettiness" wasn't the right starting point for understanding those motivations.
A much simpler real world analogy would be the DPRK forcing censorship of the South Korean flag, or the ROK doing the same to North Korea. Or something involving Israel and Iran. Or India and Pakistan.
These are all real things. There shouldn't ever be a reason to hide the fact that they exist no matter if todays reality wasn't todays reality.
But when I see other people (in China, in Europe, really in most places that aren't the US) supporting tighter speech restrictions than we do, I understand that that's for some reason other than them being assholes, or childish, or hypersensitive, or whatever. I probably wouldn't like their reasons if I fully understood them, but I also accept that being an American means I don't fully understand them.
[As a side note not directed at you but at some others in this thread, it sounds like trying to draw this distinction gets me labeled as some kind of communist shill. What the fuck ever.]
Which facts? How are they presented?
Palestine has a UN seat, Taiwan doesn't. Taiwan has control of their territory, Palestine doesn't.
Which one is more 'a country'?
They had a civil war and the other side fled to Taiwan. This is a major issue for China.