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I think you're arguing a strawman here. My original point was that other places legitimately view the United States and China in a comparable light. You've buil
by thereare5lights 8y ago
I think you're arguing a strawman here. My original point was that other places legitimately view the United States and China in a comparable light. You've built up a strawman of human rights. That was never my argument.
You are ostensibly correct that China treats its own citizens worse than America does in the present day. That is irrelevant to how other countries view the US and China. What matters is how the US and China have treated other countries. On that score, China is far better. The US has been meddling in many countries' internal affairs, launching coups, secretly backing internal groups looking to topple governments. The CIA has been very, very active since its inception. Blowback is a very real thing. The US is simply addicted to foreign military action. We accuse Russia of meddling in our elections when we do the same thing to other countries. Sure, China might decide to do the exact same things, but so far, there hasn't been any evidence that it has, at least not on the same scale. Hence, it's very clear why the places that we have fucked over would view China more positively than the US. They simply don't have the record that we do when it comes to foreign intervention.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/which-countries-dont-like-america-and-which-do/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/which-countr...
My point is simple. The comment I replied to said:
> The salient point is that china as super power is negative independent of where you're sitting.
This is simply not true. There are places that either are not affected and would be neutral, or places that have already been negatively impacted by the US as a superpower and would be positively impacted by having another competing superpower. You then turned this into a game of who has better humans rights and which is the lesser of two evils (which actually is not objective and depends on the viewer) which is a gigantic straw man.
> Even if we do want to go head-to-head on historical wrongs, the Great Leap Forward alone makes even pre-Civil-Rights-Movement America look utopian in comparison.
You wildly underestimate the brutality of slavery era America. Even China doesn't torture its own citizens like how Americans systemically tortured, beat, raped, and generally treated slaves as animals.
China doesn't have citizens roving around committing lynchings and massacres of minorities. They get rounded up but they aren't killed with impunity by the civilians in the majority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States. These murderers were often put on trial and found not guilty. That's legally sanctioned murder. The documented incidents are just those that didn't get covered up. Who knows how many other incidents like that happened during the lynching era?
After the Civil War and up until the Civil Rights era, there was a culture of shut your mouth and stay in your lane or you might just end up being killed by a mob of white people that thought you were just a little bit too uppity. Sure it wasn't everywhere, but it was in enough places.
Mass famine makes this look like utopia? On the one hand the famines may have been politically targeted. On the other hand, they didn't actually kill anyone directly compared slavery/lynching. If you wanna call that utopia, fine, you're entitled to your own opinion.