yourbandsucks

Don't forget the part where they all have access to running water and penicillin now. They're responsible for the greatest humanitarian success story in world history over the last 40 years.

Overlay that with how the US spent our cold war dividend over the same period..

Every big country has got some skeletons attached to it, especially including the US.

If you're primed to see the foreign country as monstrous and evil, you'll see it that way, whatever the balance of the facts for people who live there may be.

For example, social credit. Do you know what it is? Do you know specifically what's being proposed and implemented right now? Or are you going off of some breathless reporting?

(super briefly, there's no consumer credit system in China. Currently there are 2 corporate credit systems evolving in response to need (alipay, wepay), and something like 15 different government-sponsored pilot programs testing different ideas in different provinces, because having consumer credit scores is in fact important for finance. This gets reported as some Big Brother Social Credit Program With A Big Dystopian Plan by western media).

Think of it as a scissor statement.

Either it's the most mild, milquetoast statement possible or it's a declaration of war against Human Rights, Mom and Apple Pie.

Eh. I commented that "Chinese people are people too" the other day and got pretty heavily downvoted.

Are those downvoters expressing a reasoned belief that Chinese people aren't people? Or are they just reduced to a set of tribal motor reflexes with up and down arrows?

I'm actually kinda hoping it's the 2nd one rather than the first.

I mean.. politics ought not to be an exercise in demanding conformity and punishing any non-standard thought.

Without LBJ, we wouldn't have had the Space Program, the various civil rights bills of the 60s, or Medicare. He also escalated Vietnam from a minor conflict to a major disaster.

Most impactful President since FDR, easily, yet he doesn't get half the press of Reagan or Nixon.

Not really. Despots usually have politics to deal with. Not everything is possible.

The companies in question had a massive technological and force advantage over the local populace with free reign when it came to managing dissent with force. Their only political concerns were back in Europe.

Nazis are not in fact people for the purposes of discussion. They are movie extras who get shot as fast as possible.

You really had to go full Godwin dehumanization on a billion people right away?

Chinese people are people too, you know.

That's certainly the official US line on the matter.

How has the official US line held up, historically, when it comes to coups vs socialists in Latin America? Why should it be different this time?

It's been like a week since the last US-backed Latin American coup.

"Rule of law" doesn't mean picking and choosing whom it applies to. Saddam was our best buddy when he was using mustard gas in Khuzestan against the right people.

International politics is rule by power rather than rule of law. The person you're replying to got it right.

How.. how many people have you shot on sight?

This development is actually terrifying. If socialism has no home on the left, we'll see it rise on the right, with nationalist tones.

Also very much part of politics, although not actually at issue anywhere near this debate, as nobody is arguing against those things.

If he would have? We should kick this guy out of the Linux Foundation because he hypothetically might disagree with us at a conference?

You seem to have your facts confused. Wood wasn't publicly planning to wear a provocative hat to a conference or anything like that.

Fighting over ethical norms is actually a pretty good definition of politics. Or one key aspect of it, at least.

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

It is complex! You're right.

It's also complex over there, where Americans don't speak the language or understand anything about the culture or history. Our lack of understanding does not make them 1-dimensional movie villains in reality.

There's a pretty significant online mob who really want to split HK off of China. I'd call 'kneecap' reasonably apt.

As far as hegemony.. I'm sorry you don't believe that :) Why is specifically China the Big Bad Guy if it's not about hegemony? Why aren't we focused on cleaning our own house first if it's about justice and freedom?

Like, if this isn't about power, we could at least stop actively supporting the horrible regimes that are useful to us? That seems like a pretty easy thing to do. Why hasn't it happened?

You can have an opinion, of course.

A mob opinion that our chief rival must be kneecapped in the name of freedom and justice is super suspect, is what I'm saying.

Americans want American hegemony, and that's fine, but please don't preach about values while you're doing it.

That's awfully cherrypicked if you're going to limit things to specifically political prisoners.

We have LOTS more prisoners, btw, 4x as many per capita, with a nasty racial bias. And that's before you get into all the dead Arabs and Latinos who dared to have a government that wasn't freedomy enough for us.

What's your exchange rate between those? Do you value the tiny number of people speaking out against the state's legitimacy that much, when were talking millions of other innocent lives?

Becoming suddenly sure that we MUST kneecap our rival for totally sound moral reasons is soooo American. I feel like I'm living in groundhog day and nobody else can tell.

This is a thread where Americans are debating whether we should "flatten" a billion people via nuclear bombardment because they don't govern themselves the way we think they should.

I'd pick a different spot to call us morally superior. Like, any other thread.

That's a good way of putting it.

I could write a book on the assumptions, stereotypes and missed opportunities involved in buying into that shift.

Partially true.. used to be that fealty to working class unions and such was pretty sacrosanct.

Blue bloods were always threatened by it of course, but they used to be split between liberals and northeastern Republicans.

I'd say using populist as an uncontroversial shorthand for bad is a pretty big change for a movement calling itself 'left'.

(This is to say nothing about Orban's merits or lack thereof, just noting the terminology)

Funny detail in our ongoing political shift: 'populist' apparently now codes as 'bad guy' for a lot of the NYT reader base.

William Jennings Bryant ain't happy.

The thing is, news consumption correlates with partisanship. Your news addicts are the least likely to actually change their mind at the ballot box with all of that 'information'.. it's doing them remarkably little good besides feeding dopamine receptors on a regular schedule.

Is that really bad, though?

Like if they said, in America, "Of course, USA #1, never forget 9/11, freedom baby", that would just be more boilerplate pandering and not really political.

Is the level of hostility that high that even such sweet nothings are treason?

'Good' and 'bad' in your sentence are subjective. Millions of mainland Chinese Blizzard customers feel differently on the HK issue than you do.

You can think that they're totally, obviously wrong, but that's politics.