What a laughable notion. Utter the words "national security" and all your checks and balances go right out the window. There are also no checks and balances for non-US citizens: it is free to violate my non-existent rights as much as it wants.
The notion that it’s no different from China is absurdist propaganda. In China there is no such thing as abuse of power if it is sanctioned by the party.
I was responding to the notion that it is completely different from China. It is not. The western nations are more totalitarian than they would like to admit.
Western governments are not controlled by a single party with an lifetime ruler and no democratic mechanisms at all for expressing dissent, let alone moderating power.
It’s not a matter of degree. Doing bad stuff is not the same as totalitarianism.
What kind of false equivalency bullshit is this? In China, you utter the words "national security" and newspapers get shut down by the police: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-beijing-shu.... Publish the wrong kind of books and they'll kidnap you and put you in prison (even if you have a foreign citizenship, which you'll conveniently "voluntarily renounce" in custody): https://www.npr.org/2020/02/25/809163417/hong-kong-bookselle....
I'm tired of this whatboutism used to excuse completely appalling behavior with -zero- checks and balances at all. Country A doing bad thing doesn't excuse Country B from doing a much worse thing.
I don't know why you think I would excuse the USA's actions, both now and in the past. "Many people want to live in X" is not a strong argument- many people want to live in the US as well... now we've gotten nowhere.
My point above is not that the US is above reproach, but that it isn't disapppearing its citizens for criticizing the government or practicing different religions or being of a specific ethnicity. Etc. To say the two countries are "equally bad" is a pro-ccp propaganda point.
The US has killed their own citizen with drones, has imprisoned people who revealed government abuse and just last year arrested more than 100 journalists.
https://cpj.org/reports/2020/12/record-number-journalists-ja...
So I could easily same the same about you, you are repeating a pro-CIA propaganda point. I would suggest to ask around in Latin-America, in Africa in China and even in Europe and ask people who they consider more a threat to world peace and which behaves in an arrogant, "my way or the highway", imperialistic manner. You will be very surprised and the whole worldview you were taught in your perfectly designed educational system will come crash down.
Less swearing allegiance to the flag and more travelling. I hope that is not ad-hominem enough to try to ban me.
I don't know what -would- be a good metric, but perhaps the expatriation rate, immigration rate to other countries, and brain drain rate would be good places to start.
If you want to have a civilized conversation, the first thing is to stop assuming everyone only consumes propagandistic drivel if you disagree with them. Many people, like myself, have traveled and lived in various other countries. Nowhere in my comments have I ever said the US doesn't have issues; in fact I quite frequently discuss the enormous issues the US has and so do most of the people that I know...
This is a freedom that I, and the media, do have and can exercise without getting imprisoned. The reporter issue -is- quite serious and needs addressing, but is related to police abusing their power during the riots last year, not the federal or state government going to people's homes and arresting them for posting online criticism of the government or ruling party. We're free to message each other and post online about every single atrocity the US government has committed without repercussion. How can a bad situation be improved if criticizing the government is impossible?
> No one wants to live in a racist country when they will be treated as second-class citizens at best.
You mean like living in any homogeneous Asian country as any ethnicity except the primary one? You accuse me of not traveling, but my experience from living in S. Korea and Japan showed me that highly homogeneous countries can be wildly racist about everyone. The US is not the only country has serious racism issues, and it's a shame that I need to state that. It seems like you think the US is one entity, but depending on the city and state it can be extremely multicultural and diverse (like Chicago, my home town).
Plenty of people are moving to the US still; I don't really find it a useful metric for an argument either way because it doesn't consider the origin country or the immigrant's prior situation.
While I would still prefer to live in the US, you would find by talking to Chinese citizens that they feel exactly the same way about their country. The same applies to Russians and other large nations. We are all being fed propaganda, it doesn’t matter what country you live in.
You can protest the government. You can talk shit about the leaders. You aren't jailed or killed for any of these things in the US. And 'as recently as 1970s' is half a century ago.
I'm European btw.
While they might not be going full Maoist China on it's dissedents, they exercise more subtle methods to control the narrative and compromising movements as well as outright assassinations of prominent figures.
This is absolutely not unique to the US of course and this goes on in Europe as well. They're just among the most irritatingly self rightous about their imaginary respect for dissent.
The powers that be always want to continue being. But methods matter. How many politicians in the US or Europe have been poisoned by the state in the last decade? Don't you think there are politicians that the government would rather didn't exist? Yet they don't kill them or fabricate charges.
It is ridiculous to compare liberal democracies with autocratic regimes.
But it is true that we really need to keep our guard up to retain our liberal democracies, they are being attacked form within as well as outside.
While I cannot disconfirm the former (though there have certainly been some high profile cases with fishy circumstances- such as JFK), what about the Russiagate nonsense with Trump? I might hate him but the manchurian candidate theory was transparently bs from the very beginning, even before the investigation that proved it. He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last. It seems to be a bipartisan thing to simultaneously shift focus of the public from national level corruption in favour of a foreign bogeyman and simultaneously slander opponents.
In a so called representative democracy, you do not need to outright murder or imprison your opponents to enforce control, you simply either have to relegate them to irrelevance through skewed or absent corporate media coverage or buy them out. See Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, early Nancy Peloski, AOC, etc.
The tactics might differ from a transparently autocratic regime but the intentions are the same, and the end result is not really as different as liberals like to paint it. For all the unpopular politicians that are allowed to continue, there is police violence, surveillance, torture, imprisonment, and outright assasinations of prominent figures in activist groups. Then there is what they get up to outside the confines of US citizenship and borders.
Look at the state of Bolivia, Columbia, most of Central and Southern America actually. They have death squads from paramilitary groups backed by US multinational companies for the sole purpose of brutally putting down any attempts at collective bargaining or real democracy. Just because it's not visible in your backyard doesn't mean your country is not responsible for that mess.
The collusion allegations were not a Manchurian candidate theory and were never disproven by any investigation. (To the contrary, prior to being pardoned by Trump, several people either plead guilty or were convicted at trial for lies to investigators the key substance of which was falsely denying active actual ot attempted coordination with Russian state actors by Trump campaign officials.) The story that Trump was somehow exonerated is itself a propaganda story from the Trump camp that waa deliberately facilitated by AG Barr’s deliberate distortion of the Mueller investigation findings.
> He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last.
He's definitely not the first politician to actively seek foreign assistance against domestic political opposition, nor the first to be sloppy enough that it gets noticed in time for it to be used against him (see, e.g., Louis XVI of France.)
Mueller specifically did not make a statement on it because he determined it to be Congress’ job and especially because he did not want to put up an appearance of political prosecution.
He left it to Republicans in Congress to do the right thing but they failed to do so.
This is the fallback excuse Democrats always play when they either don't really want to implement something (such as a $15 minimum wage) or they know they don't really have a leg to stand on - blame the Republicans. Same excuse made by Obama and the same excuse now being made by Biden.
When you have decades of experience dealing with a political opponent that has proven time and time again to be acting in bad faith, defering to their sense of decorem and morality is being complicit in their actions in my eyes.
And no, it did not exonerate Trump. He's obviously corrupt to the bone but the specific angle was significant Russian interference and Mueller completely failed to substantiate it. It's also worth noting that despite the media making a big song and dance around Trump meetings with Putin, the actual policies during his administration were significantly more adversarial towards Russian economic interests than Biden's administration has been so far.
So, you're telling me the victims are still alive? 50 years is not a long time
Someone has some reading to do.......
Don't hurt yourself moving those goalposts.
The United States and China are nothing alike. Try flying a Winnie the Pooh blimp (makes fun of China’s leader) in China and see how long before that gets shut down. We can also freely talk about what is going on in China/HK/TW/wugiwers here, where such speech would be prohibited in China.
There were accusations of forced sterilization at the Mexican border: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-54265571
> disappearing political dissidents
cough Julian Assange, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning
Yes, it's not "disappearing" as in "getting them killed", but nevertheless their treatment has been horrifying.
> creating debt traps for the developing world
The US has putsched against a lot of Southern American countries and keeps supplying their narco gangs with money and weaponry. That is just as bad as the Chinese debt trapping.
> The United States launches inquiries into civilian casualties
Lots of police violence goes unpunished. Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio and soldiers convicted of war crimes.
> enforces regulations generally aimed towards the public good
Hard disagree. The amount of regulations torn down during the Trump term is massive.
> enforces rule of law
For those who can afford it, see my point about police violence above.
> has free democratic elections
The US is still considered a "flawed democracy" (https://thehill.com/homenews/news/537204-us-score-falls-in-e...), partially due to systematic voter discrimination (gerrymandering, voting access requirements).
> If you would rather live in the orbit of any single other superpower or empire in world history, you're deluded.
Come to the European Union. I admit it, we are not perfect either (particularly on handling the refugee situation and member countries drifting towards authoritarianism and dictatorship), but generally we are a better society in a number of metrics.
They haven’t been disappeared.
Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets. Literally decades of abuse before authorities finally arrest them, and only because regular people came out and protested after they heard of the stories publicly. Like the gov had no idea ever... for decades on open secrets like that... until now?
The effort put into these scenarios are very skewed.
Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets.
Do you expect the police to just magically know that people are committing crime? The criminal investigation process usually begins with a police report (of someone reporting a crime). In the absence of a police report (as with the Epstein and Weinstein cases) the police have "no cause" to investigate absent some other mechanism that publicly reveals alleged crimes (like a news report). And on that note, in both of the cases you cited, prosecutors did try to investigate the rumors, but couldn't find anyone wiling to testify against those men until the scale of their crimes became public.
Epstein was arrested and awaiting trial once his crimes became publicly known, and before he committed suicide was expected to face charges in multiple states and countries. Epstein became so toxic that multiple men known to have gone to Epstein's parties have faced social and financial repercussions for it. Melinda Gates famously divorced Bill because of his friendship with Epstein. Similarly, Weinstein was also arrested once his crimes became public and is facing charges in multiple states, was kicked out of every industry group, and essentially banished from his former life.
Nitpick, but wasn't that only true of Manning? Assange irresponsibly put Manning's cables out in unredacted form, which I believe revealed the names of sources who were put in danger. IIRC, Snowden only leaked to Greenwald and a few mainstream newspapers who were careful to make redactions on what they released to avoid such outcomes.
That's partially a product of the US justice system, which is among the more rigorous in the world, and tends to favor letting the guilty go free over punishing the innocent. This is a trade-off, not an objectively bad thing.
Now, I would attribute the rest of those scenarios to plain-old corruption - which is a problem for every system of government without checks and balances (that are actually used).
What are you talking about? Epstein died in jail, and Weinstein is currently in prison.
Read up on that story. It was malpractice by one outside doctor that served one detention center, it was not government policy.
https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-society/dark-histo...
Shameless.
instead they just bomb them to smithereens
>taking over city states
you gotta think on the scale of countries with puppet governments
>disappearing political dissidents
south american leaders would disagree
>creating debt traps for the developing world
what is IMF?
>shutting down newspapers
NSA was just caught spying on Tucker Carlson
>United States launches inquiries into civilian casualties
We investigated out selves and found out nothing wrong, and if you try to arrest our soldiers we'll bomb your country
>enforces regulations generally aimed towards the public good
regulations paid for by lobbyists on behalf of billionaire donors
> enforces rule of law
every country enforces rule of law
> has free democratic elections
press x to doubt
> and generally upholds the rights and freedoms outlined in its constitution
what is Patriot ACT?
I'm an American and I love my country, despite its flaws, but you are either a paid shill at Langley or brainwashed beyond disbelief
Did you miss the unconstitutional lockdowns for the "Boston Bomber"?
And...many other "emergencies", as decided by a single US politician?
https://nation.time.com/2013/04/19/was-boston-actually-on-lo...
And probably soon "public health"
Saddam is gone. Iraq is a fledgling democracy, which was unthinkable 25 years ago, and their oil output is persistently near record highs.
Iraq has a GDP per capita higher than Indonesia, the Philippines, Jordan, Egypt. And not far from South Africa or Paraguay. It's not a total disaster at present, they legitimately have a chance to build something there in the coming decades.
These two things are simultaneously true: Iraq's future prospects are better because the US invaded, and the US should not have invaded.
The Korean War involved dramatically more misery than Iraq did. Millions of people died in just a few years. Ask the South Koreans if they would prefer that the Kim family were ruling over them while they exist in absolute poverty today.
Isn't it just fascinating how today nobody dares to proclaim that the US should have left North Korea to conquer and rule South Korea, that that would have been the obvious better outcome vs the misery they went through for decades after the war. No, people wouldn't dare to say that, but they'll say it about Iraq, because it's a convenient stick to beat the US with. If Iraq's fortunes improve in the coming decades, those same people will go largely silent on the matter and the narrative will be modified (go back and read how the narrative on the Korean War changed across the decades as South Korea's situation radically improved).
The people of Iraq have a chance to chart their own course democratically. The US doesn't rule Iraq, we didn't take their oil, we didn't annex their territory. We lost two trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers trying to stop them from killing eachother in a religious war. The situation in Iraq is very far from perfect, so what, the lack of perfection isn't a valid counter argument; the situation in South Korea after the Korean War was very very far from perfect for decades.
Even the US was a basketcase for decades after its founding. It was held together by a string, ultimately culminating in a very bloody civil war as well.
It took decades for South Korea to build up the structures necessary to sustain itself as a democracy and lift the standard of living of its people. They were still poor as recently as the early 1980s. Why is it that people think Iraq should have been instantly transformed into a mecca? That's a level of expectation nobody would dare apply to any other similar context. As though the end of Saddam's rule was somehow going to be soft and fluffy, rather than involving misery. There was no other scenario than to go through misery given the sectarian split in Iraq and the way Iraq was being ruled, it was always going to prompt a civil war.
The issue is that the US was involved. It's an easy point that can be used to hit the US with.
How can I be sure of that? Well, simple, consider the alternative. The opposite position is: condemn the people of Iraq to living under Saddam and his sadistic family (or the equivalent). I'll note that was a minority political group oppressing and torturing a far larger majority group through a brutal totalitarian system with zero human rights. Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that? I'd challenge someone to dare to say that right now and then back it up as the better alternative to the present (that's not what would happen of course; a person will instead proclaim a fantasy scenario of fluffy bunnies and utopia where glorious happiness and peace would shine from the sky magically and all the conflicting groups in Iraq would hold a love-in and Saddam would have just willingly retired as dictator-for-life and then there would have been no civil war in the aftermath and instead it would have been an organic gentle process).
I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better if the US hadn't rescued South Korea from being enslaved by North Korea's Kim Dynasty. Because that's exactly what people so often openly proclaim about the Iraq situation, including its majority Shia and minority Kurds who were brutalized by Saddam.
The US shouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq, it should have never invaded Iraq. However the prospects for the people of Iraq are not worse today than they were under Saddam's reign of terror. And it's entirely an intellectual con that Iraq was supposedly stable under Saddam (one of the few arguments frequently thrown out in support of the Saddam scenario). Iraq was extraordinarily unstable under Saddam, which is why he had to constantly murder and purge people. When you have actual stability you don't have to slaughter and torture people; Saddam had to do that constantly to prevent his system from collapsing due to its inherent instability.
"Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that?" I condemn them to figure out their own future, do what's necessary and proper to attain it - whether it be suffer under Saddam or overthrow him is for the Iraqi people to decide. Not American politicians and intelligence services you seem to be a sycophant for.
"I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better..." False choice, get better at your moral justifications. Going to address the way the US public was lied into the Iraq Pillaging? You compare the Pillaging of Iraq with the Korean War - one had an aggressor (KPA crossed the line a thing that actually happened to instigate the war) and we had obligations to the First Republic of Korea. The US had and has no obligations to the Iraqi people, we just lied about Iraq and Saddam's relation to terrorists so the American ruling class could do it's thing.
I can't get passed this post boiling down to "we shouldn't have gone, but we did and Iraq is better for it" You completely fail to address the opportunity costs involved from the US side. Who are you trying to convince with this moral justification for invading Iraq, yourself?
I'll chop a hand off if Iraq becomes anything like South Korea before 2100.
I was arguing with someone about a fringe website the other day, and I think I finally understand the thought process a lot of these people have. I think many are people who are strongly and habitually opposed to something (in this case, US injustices) have that opposition warp their perception of other things (especially things "opposed" to the US). Sometimes that means they see discussion of other injustices carried out by US adversaries as a distraction to be fought. Other times, that means denying and defending against accusations of injustice against a US opponent. In extreme cases, it means starting to explicitly support those opponents, even through they're arguably worse on almost every value axis these people started with.
tl;dr: anti-imperialists who oppose the US imperialism can sometimes become defenders of imperialism done by US adversaries.
This is article that helped me realize this:
https://newpol.org/against-the-grayzone-slanders/:
> During the Vietnam War, opposition to the United States and support for national self-determination for the Vietnamese among young activists sometimes developed into support for the Vietnamese Communist Party and its leader. One often heard at the protest demonstrations, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Going to Win.” While this drift from opposition to the U.S. government to support for the Vietnamese government was understandable as a gut reaction to the horrors of the U.S. war, it was also very problematic. Most people chanted this slogan naively, but some gradually became supporters of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist government, and of the Soviet Union that was backing it. Few in the movement pointed out that Ho and the Vietnamese Communists were Stalinists who had murdered their leftist competitors and strove to construct a Soviet-style state in Vietnam, which is eventually what happened.
Should the US not have intervened to prop up RVN, disrupting millions of lives of young americans (and losing 50,000 of them), and killing hundreds of thousands (millions?) of others from carpet bombings, napalm, etc? No, and continuing escalation was criminal on the parts of Johnson, Nixon, and their henchmen.
But somehow people need to take that into somehow supporting and idolizing the exact horrific, militant, violent, racist traits they claim they are against. At the end of the day, they just don't like the US (or use opposition to the US as a virtual signal) - it has nothing to do with opposing unethical things.