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All these things seem like desperate moves from a failing empire. I don't believe for a second the U.S. cares about human rights here. That doesn't mean I thin

All these things seem like desperate moves from a failing empire. I don't believe for a second the U.S. cares about human rights here. That doesn't mean I think the CCP is 'good', but 2 things can be true at the same time. EDIT: typo

mclightning 6y ago
US to care about human rights is not necessarily a precursor condition for this set of events to be eventually better for human rights.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  Exactly. US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights. But the defeat of Nazi German and Imperialist Japan had huge, favorable results for human rights.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    Back then the politics were a lot less polarized and you had sane domestic policy under FDR, these are different times. That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.
    - kick 6y ago
      Less polarized? Huey Long got shot for FDR to get in, and actual socialism was a thing in the United States. Assassination attempts were regularly made against union busters.
      - AsyncAwait 6y ago
        What I meant was that there was a better sense of what left or right actually means on an international scale. Nowdays centre-right presidents like Barack Obama or Biden get called socialist, somebody on the international centre left like Sanders is apparently a communist and Chomsky is an out of his mind, left of Mao crazy person. Pink haired college kids are apparently a serious threat and there's a "culture war" or something. It seems fairly abnormal, especially considering Medicare for All is apparently still crazy, even in the middle of a deadly pandemic the U.S. is currently doing terrible at.
        kick 6y ago
        I don't think polarized is necessarily the right word for it, it just seems like American politics has jeered strongly to the right, dragging the people who dislike it into liberalism to seem reasonable.
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
      > had sane domestic policy under FDR, Is this the same FDR that tried to pack the US Supreme Court and interned over 100,000 Americans of Japanese decent in camps? > That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force. WWII was pretty much brute force all the way. Around the clock bombings of enemy cities and civilians. Firebombing Tokyo, nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was from the US side. The Soviet side had such things as massive artillery barages of cities, no step back rule where people with machine guns shot their own soldiers for not advancing fast enough.
      - AsyncAwait 6y ago
        You're confusing foreign policy and domestic policy. FDR was horrific on foreign policy and had his problems at home, but he understood with the Great Depression at least that some serious economic steps had to be taken in favor of your average worker for the system "as is" to survive. Right now, the U.S. is "number #1" at handling COVID 19 the absolute worst and still calling Medicare for All a crazy idea, even in the middle of a pandemic, while apparently Biden, a proven right-leaning centrist as somehow being a socialist. Crazy watching this unfold.
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      > Back then the politics were a lot less polarized I count 4 political assassinations in the years around WWII[^1] [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_politicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_...
  - pravda 6y ago
    >US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights. Reasons? There were no reasons, the US entered WWII when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor! And then Germany declared war on the US.
- mcqueenjordan 6y ago
  Exactly. I think Noam Chomsky said something along these lines: I cannot think of a case where a nation intervened in or influenced another country in a purely disinterested humanitarian fashion. That doesn't mean national interests cannot coincide with good outcomes, though.
  - mhroth 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-GUAxmxdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-GUAxmxdk
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Kosovo? The US didn't seem to have much in the way of interests there.
    - rhodium 6y ago
      Kosovo was a part of Serbia, a Russian-backed client state. You would never see the US advocate for the people's right for self-determination for Palestine or Scotland.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Yes. But I don't think that giving more power to the US Empire will be better for human rights long term. The US and it's client states also kill millions of people for profit.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    Do.. you have a citation for that?
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      Iraq War, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, 90% civilian death rate from drone strikes? Yemen and supporting the Saudis who are much worse than anything you think of in terms of the CCP? Coups in Iran, Latin America, elsewhere? For profit prisons denying people basic rights and what's basically slave labor, police killing unarmed citizens, horrific COVID response that's guaranteed to have led to preventable deaths?
    - chrischen 6y ago
      US prison system, law enforcement system. BLM movement. We do systematically repress them to lower classes, and also kill them directly (through a violent law enforcement system), and indirectly (deaths of despair, deaths from crime as a result of systematic poverty).
      - vorpalhex 6y ago
        > US prison system https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6766 https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6766 > law enforcement system. BLM movement (I assume you mean what BLM is protesting and not that BLM is killing people) https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... > We do systematically repress them to lower classes If you are systematically repressing people, please stop. I'm not, so I'm not sure where this "we" is coming from. > and also kill them directly (through a violent law enforcement system) You are more likely to die by car accident, heart attack, suicide or coronavirus than cop. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the system. > and indirectly (deaths of despair, deaths from crime as a result of systematic poverty). I encourage you to fight poverty and the best way to do it is through donating to meaningful charities. That doesn't seem unique to the US though.
qeternity 6y ago
*CCP
3pt14159 6y ago
For things like this there isn't a "the U.S." there's groups of people, interest groups, political economy, political will, etc. If China were rapidly liberalizing and didn't have stains on their reputation like the HK protest lockdowns, minority subjugation, and horrible prison conditions it would be a lot harder to push any of these changes through. As it stands, democrats and republicans are both turning hawkish on China and the business interests that used to dominate have started to turn sour too.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  But is it really? Were the people complaining about the war in Yemen or the atrocities of Saudi Arabia or the horrors of the Iraq War able to meaningfully change anything? Or is it the case that the only time that human rights actually enact change is when there is an underlying material interest, making them little more than a veneer?
  - willis936 6y ago
    There’s a value in quantity. Show me mass genocide happening in any of those other human rights violation hotspots.
  - zanny 6y ago
    Well yeah, of course. Pretty much every US city is buried in homeless populations because human decency is off the table if there isn't a profit motive behind it. You can look at the glass is half full view of this, though - thanks to selfish interests an evil regime is being cut off from market access to spy on people around the world. Its of mutual benefit to the capitalists that saw this happen and the people whom China would have invaded the privacy of. Of course that begs the question what Oppo, Xiaomi, etc are still doing in US markets... just because they are using international SoCs doesn't mean their assembly in China is trustworthy. But if you start asking those questions you start wondering about all the phones assembled in China by external companies like Apple or all the chips added to Samsung phones sourced from China, etc.
    - 6y ago
president 6y ago
There are gradients to everything. Where in the US we have a free press to document human rights violations and people can voice their opinion, China has none. The problem with statements like yours is that it completely trivializes the major violations of one country and the progress that has been made in improving human rights of the other.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Not sure why you’re being downvoted. What you said is factually correct. Like 3000+ anti Trump stories on NYTimes. Try that in China?
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    That's fair, on the other hand, is China semiregularly bombing hospitals in the Middle East? You can cherry-pick certain facts to suit you either way. As for "free press", the U.S. has the appearance of free press that is shockingly uniform on issues of war for example, controlled by very few entities in total.
    - codekansas 6y ago
      Hard to tell without a free press
      - chrischen 6y ago
        Hard to tell with a free press, since people just find the news they want to hear anyways. I guess our situation with getting news from Facebook is voluntary censorship. Maybe that’s better than forced censorship? What if the controller of news is benevolent? I think the situation is that the Chinese government is mostly benevolent to its own citizens, which is why it has fairly good political support domestically. They are however not benevolent to the US interests, which is why we want to stop them. One benefit of a free press is that we’d be able to introduce our own propaganda into the country to push agendas that benefit ourselves.
systemvoltage 6y ago
Can you name a nation that does not care about their own interests? US or not, replace it with France or Brazil or India. It’s not just US, - Japan, EU, SK, APEC, India, Australia, NZ, everyone is piling up on the CCP’s regime that it has built up by abusing its own citizens, iron grip over the society, surveillance and extreme form of asymmetry in trade. Look up: http://www.ipac.global http://www.ipac.global So bashing on US is convenient and easy but you’re turning away from the actual geo political climate against China, clouding your own judgement perhaps with prejudice but I won’t go that far.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  Oh, come on. You're pretending that the U.S. is not the world's sole superpower right now and that all the countries you just named aren't U.S. partners with hardly independent foreign policies. Or are you telling me that Saudi Arabia has better human rights than China? Because it's certainly not being pilled on anywhere as much by any of them.
- coliveira 6y ago
  That's completely hypocritical. The US was just fine with the exploitation of workers in China while it made economical sense. Now that the US is losing its grip on power, they want to create this nonsensical narrative.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Actually, you're right. American executives sold off their souls to cheaper prices, moved factories out of US and exploited cheap labor. It is still going on at a monumental scale - Apple for example. So, it is capitalism at its worst. The government failed to keep American interests and now they're back peddling. Furthermore, literally every developed country is at the helm of Chinese goods. Every nation in the world. There is a giant Huawei office as soon as you get out of the Zurich airport housing probably 5000 people. The Japanese sold off their local businesses and shut down factories, moved them to China for cheaper labor. What IPAC is doing is to bring right government officials together to back peddle and put brakes on it because capitalism will bankrupt their host nations and enrich China.

mclightning 6y ago

US to care about human rights is not necessarily a precursor condition for this set of events to be eventually better for human rights.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Exactly. US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights. But the defeat of Nazi German and Imperialist Japan had huge, favorable results for human rights.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  Back then the politics were a lot less polarized and you had sane domestic policy under FDR, these are different times. That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.
  - kick 6y ago
    Less polarized? Huey Long got shot for FDR to get in, and actual socialism was a thing in the United States. Assassination attempts were regularly made against union busters.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      What I meant was that there was a better sense of what left or right actually means on an international scale. Nowdays centre-right presidents like Barack Obama or Biden get called socialist, somebody on the international centre left like Sanders is apparently a communist and Chomsky is an out of his mind, left of Mao crazy person. Pink haired college kids are apparently a serious threat and there's a "culture war" or something. It seems fairly abnormal, especially considering Medicare for All is apparently still crazy, even in the middle of a deadly pandemic the U.S. is currently doing terrible at.
      - kick 6y ago
        I don't think polarized is necessarily the right word for it, it just seems like American politics has jeered strongly to the right, dragging the people who dislike it into liberalism to seem reasonable.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > had sane domestic policy under FDR, Is this the same FDR that tried to pack the US Supreme Court and interned over 100,000 Americans of Japanese decent in camps? > That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force. WWII was pretty much brute force all the way. Around the clock bombings of enemy cities and civilians. Firebombing Tokyo, nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was from the US side. The Soviet side had such things as massive artillery barages of cities, no step back rule where people with machine guns shot their own soldiers for not advancing fast enough.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      You're confusing foreign policy and domestic policy. FDR was horrific on foreign policy and had his problems at home, but he understood with the Great Depression at least that some serious economic steps had to be taken in favor of your average worker for the system "as is" to survive. Right now, the U.S. is "number #1" at handling COVID 19 the absolute worst and still calling Medicare for All a crazy idea, even in the middle of a pandemic, while apparently Biden, a proven right-leaning centrist as somehow being a socialist. Crazy watching this unfold.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    > Back then the politics were a lot less polarized I count 4 political assassinations in the years around WWII[^1] [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_politicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_...
- pravda 6y ago
  >US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights. Reasons? There were no reasons, the US entered WWII when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor! And then Germany declared war on the US.
mcqueenjordan 6y ago
Exactly. I think Noam Chomsky said something along these lines: I cannot think of a case where a nation intervened in or influenced another country in a purely disinterested humanitarian fashion. That doesn't mean national interests cannot coincide with good outcomes, though.
- mhroth 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-GUAxmxdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-GUAxmxdk
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Kosovo? The US didn't seem to have much in the way of interests there.
  - rhodium 6y ago
    Kosovo was a part of Serbia, a Russian-backed client state. You would never see the US advocate for the people's right for self-determination for Palestine or Scotland.
sudosysgen 6y ago
Yes. But I don't think that giving more power to the US Empire will be better for human rights long term. The US and it's client states also kill millions of people for profit.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Do.. you have a citation for that?
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    Iraq War, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, 90% civilian death rate from drone strikes? Yemen and supporting the Saudis who are much worse than anything you think of in terms of the CCP? Coups in Iran, Latin America, elsewhere? For profit prisons denying people basic rights and what's basically slave labor, police killing unarmed citizens, horrific COVID response that's guaranteed to have led to preventable deaths?
  - chrischen 6y ago
    US prison system, law enforcement system. BLM movement. We do systematically repress them to lower classes, and also kill them directly (through a violent law enforcement system), and indirectly (deaths of despair, deaths from crime as a result of systematic poverty).
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      > US prison system https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6766 https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6766 > law enforcement system. BLM movement (I assume you mean what BLM is protesting and not that BLM is killing people) https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... > We do systematically repress them to lower classes If you are systematically repressing people, please stop. I'm not, so I'm not sure where this "we" is coming from. > and also kill them directly (through a violent law enforcement system) You are more likely to die by car accident, heart attack, suicide or coronavirus than cop. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the system. > and indirectly (deaths of despair, deaths from crime as a result of systematic poverty). I encourage you to fight poverty and the best way to do it is through donating to meaningful charities. That doesn't seem unique to the US though.

qeternity 6y ago

*CCP

3pt14159 6y ago

For things like this there isn't a "the U.S." there's groups of people, interest groups, political economy, political will, etc. If China were rapidly liberalizing and didn't have stains on their reputation like the HK protest lockdowns, minority subjugation, and horrible prison conditions it would be a lot harder to push any of these changes through. As it stands, democrats and republicans are both turning hawkish on China and the business interests that used to dominate have started to turn sour too.

sudosysgen 6y ago
But is it really? Were the people complaining about the war in Yemen or the atrocities of Saudi Arabia or the horrors of the Iraq War able to meaningfully change anything? Or is it the case that the only time that human rights actually enact change is when there is an underlying material interest, making them little more than a veneer?
- willis936 6y ago
  There’s a value in quantity. Show me mass genocide happening in any of those other human rights violation hotspots.
- zanny 6y ago
  Well yeah, of course. Pretty much every US city is buried in homeless populations because human decency is off the table if there isn't a profit motive behind it. You can look at the glass is half full view of this, though - thanks to selfish interests an evil regime is being cut off from market access to spy on people around the world. Its of mutual benefit to the capitalists that saw this happen and the people whom China would have invaded the privacy of. Of course that begs the question what Oppo, Xiaomi, etc are still doing in US markets... just because they are using international SoCs doesn't mean their assembly in China is trustworthy. But if you start asking those questions you start wondering about all the phones assembled in China by external companies like Apple or all the chips added to Samsung phones sourced from China, etc.
  - 6y ago

president 6y ago

There are gradients to everything. Where in the US we have a free press to document human rights violations and people can voice their opinion, China has none. The problem with statements like yours is that it completely trivializes the major violations of one country and the progress that has been made in improving human rights of the other.

systemvoltage 6y ago
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. What you said is factually correct. Like 3000+ anti Trump stories on NYTimes. Try that in China?
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  That's fair, on the other hand, is China semiregularly bombing hospitals in the Middle East? You can cherry-pick certain facts to suit you either way. As for "free press", the U.S. has the appearance of free press that is shockingly uniform on issues of war for example, controlled by very few entities in total.
  - codekansas 6y ago
    Hard to tell without a free press
    - chrischen 6y ago
      Hard to tell with a free press, since people just find the news they want to hear anyways. I guess our situation with getting news from Facebook is voluntary censorship. Maybe that’s better than forced censorship? What if the controller of news is benevolent? I think the situation is that the Chinese government is mostly benevolent to its own citizens, which is why it has fairly good political support domestically. They are however not benevolent to the US interests, which is why we want to stop them. One benefit of a free press is that we’d be able to introduce our own propaganda into the country to push agendas that benefit ourselves.

systemvoltage 6y ago

Can you name a nation that does not care about their own interests? US or not, replace it with France or Brazil or India. It’s not just US, - Japan, EU, SK, APEC, India, Australia, NZ, everyone is piling up on the CCP’s regime that it has built up by abusing its own citizens, iron grip over the society, surveillance and extreme form of asymmetry in trade. Look up: http://www.ipac.global http://www.ipac.global So bashing on US is convenient and easy but you’re turning away from the actual geo political climate against China, clouding your own judgement perhaps with prejudice but I won’t go that far.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
Oh, come on. You're pretending that the U.S. is not the world's sole superpower right now and that all the countries you just named aren't U.S. partners with hardly independent foreign policies. Or are you telling me that Saudi Arabia has better human rights than China? Because it's certainly not being pilled on anywhere as much by any of them.
coliveira 6y ago
That's completely hypocritical. The US was just fine with the exploitation of workers in China while it made economical sense. Now that the US is losing its grip on power, they want to create this nonsensical narrative.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Actually, you're right. American executives sold off their souls to cheaper prices, moved factories out of US and exploited cheap labor. It is still going on at a monumental scale - Apple for example. So, it is capitalism at its worst. The government failed to keep American interests and now they're back peddling. Furthermore, literally every developed country is at the helm of Chinese goods. Every nation in the world. There is a giant Huawei office as soon as you get out of the Zurich airport housing probably 5000 people. The Japanese sold off their local businesses and shut down factories, moved them to China for cheaper labor. What IPAC is doing is to bring right government officials together to back peddle and put brakes on it because capitalism will bankrupt their host nations and enrich China.