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As I said, I don't view them as morally equivalent, just not as far apart as I'd like them to be and people who experienced i.e. [1] probably view the U.S. as m

As I said, I don't view them as morally equivalent, just not as far apart as I'd like them to be and people who experienced i.e. [1] probably view the U.S. as much worse, if you take the Korean War, Vietnam, Latin America, The Middle East, that's millions of civilians killed within living memory. 2003 Iraq alone is ~200,000, (up to 1mil per some), and that's discounting the first Gulf War or the sanctions following it that killed overwhelmingly civilians. The difference between you and me is that I don't see killing foreign civilians as somehow less horrible than domestic ones. When you say it's different during the "course of a war", worth noting that in many places no formal war was ever declared. In places like Pakistan, the drone warfare for example is more of a shadow war than anything. As for people dying due to lack of healthcare and you not counting it, if we're going to attribute the evils of CCP to "communism", why discount deaths attributable to "capitalism" so easily? My ideology disagrees strongly with the CCP, but I try to be as objective as possible when evaluating any actor, especially one that is subject to wast amounts of U.S. propaganda and is hard to ever get a more nuanced picture of. Another issue is that the U.S. likes to present itself as a moral leader on the world stage, so it should be held to higher standards. I am not even going into the issue of financial sanctions, where China has nowhere the amount of power the U.S. has. And the American government is willing to use that power to block shipments of food and medicine to countries it does not like, even during an unprecedented global pandemic. I appreciate this is not discussed regularly on evening news, unlike China is, but it is very much real, this is why when you poll people from around the world, the U.S. usually comes #1 as a threat to world peace[2]. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A... 2 - https://www.axios.com/the-biggest-global-threats-us-russia-china-c3230b2c-447e-472a-b9dc-5b2a2e2b3117.html https://www.axios.com/the-biggest-global-threats-us-russia-c... P.S. I don't say this to try and paint the West negatively. I say this because I want us to actually be as morally correct as we'd claim we are instead of just diluting ourselves into thinking we are soo much better already. In other words, I'd really like the propaganda to actually match the reality.

throwaway894345 6y ago
> As for people dying due to lack of healthcare and you not counting it, if we're going to attribute the evils of CCP to "communism", why discount deaths attributable to "capitalism" so easily? Because the deaths aren’t attributable to capitalism. Capitalism has increased longevity all over the world, including in China. In China, it not only made medical advancements available to the Chinese, but China’s recent prosperity (and the consequent improvements in health outcomes) is directly attributable to its slide toward capitalism. By contrast, the policies of mass murder and starvation during the “Great Leap Forward” were a massive regression in Chinese outcomes. Of course, all of this misses the point that even if the outcomes were exactly the same in both countries, a bad outcome due to malice is still morally worse than the same outcome due to incompetence. Failing to provide top notch healthcare to a country’s citizens is a much less grave offense than outright murdering millions of citizens to protect or extend one’s political power. America’s postwar faults aren’t comparable to those of China’s, and while I understand and appreciate your goal of trying to draw attention to America’s own faults, trying to make the comparison with China has the opposite effect. The US is already incomparably better than China, but we shouldn’t settle is the argument you ought to be making, IMO.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  > Failing to provide top notch healthcare to a country’s citizens is a much less grave offense than outright murdering millions of citizens to protect or extend one’s political power. It's fair to say it's not as bad as doing it for political power, but it's worth noting that in the U.S. aprox. 45000 people a year die due to lack of adequate healthcare. Over the past 4-6 decades, it indeed ads up to millions dead. This state of things is directly attributable to law makers being lobbied by corporate interests. Practically every other developed nation has some form of universal healthcare. We can add a large number of those that died from the current pandemic, since quite visibly the countries with universal healthcare did much better. Your argument essentially seems to be that it's way better for private interests to influence public policy in a negative way than having the state enacting terrible policies by itself. I agree that it makes it more distributed, but still terrible. And yes, it is capitalism. You cannot just take the good parts and disregard the bad. > I understand and appreciate your goal of trying to draw attention to America’s own faults, trying to make the comparison with China has the opposite effect. The US is already incomparably better than China. This is my main issue with your argument. Sure, China is still worse, I acknowledge that, my argument is that the U.S. is not as much better as many, including you, probably think. You have a much more direct impact on the U.S. and making it better than you have on China. Diluting yourself into thinking the U.S. is already essentially "the good guys" prevents you from having the will to actively improve it and over time leads to the fact of it being not as far from China as you'd like. The world already thinks of America as the bigger threat to world peace, you can keep telling yourself what you want, but the rest of the world has a much less rosy picture of the U.S. than you'd think and the best way to keep China from "taking over" is not to ban TikTok but to work hard to improve that image.

throwaway894345 6y ago

> As for people dying due to lack of healthcare and you not counting it, if we're going to attribute the evils of CCP to "communism", why discount deaths attributable to "capitalism" so easily? Because the deaths aren’t attributable to capitalism. Capitalism has increased longevity all over the world, including in China. In China, it not only made medical advancements available to the Chinese, but China’s recent prosperity (and the consequent improvements in health outcomes) is directly attributable to its slide toward capitalism. By contrast, the policies of mass murder and starvation during the “Great Leap Forward” were a massive regression in Chinese outcomes. Of course, all of this misses the point that even if the outcomes were exactly the same in both countries, a bad outcome due to malice is still morally worse than the same outcome due to incompetence. Failing to provide top notch healthcare to a country’s citizens is a much less grave offense than outright murdering millions of citizens to protect or extend one’s political power. America’s postwar faults aren’t comparable to those of China’s, and while I understand and appreciate your goal of trying to draw attention to America’s own faults, trying to make the comparison with China has the opposite effect. The US is already incomparably better than China, but we shouldn’t settle is the argument you ought to be making, IMO.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
> Failing to provide top notch healthcare to a country’s citizens is a much less grave offense than outright murdering millions of citizens to protect or extend one’s political power. It's fair to say it's not as bad as doing it for political power, but it's worth noting that in the U.S. aprox. 45000 people a year die due to lack of adequate healthcare. Over the past 4-6 decades, it indeed ads up to millions dead. This state of things is directly attributable to law makers being lobbied by corporate interests. Practically every other developed nation has some form of universal healthcare. We can add a large number of those that died from the current pandemic, since quite visibly the countries with universal healthcare did much better. Your argument essentially seems to be that it's way better for private interests to influence public policy in a negative way than having the state enacting terrible policies by itself. I agree that it makes it more distributed, but still terrible. And yes, it is capitalism. You cannot just take the good parts and disregard the bad. > I understand and appreciate your goal of trying to draw attention to America’s own faults, trying to make the comparison with China has the opposite effect. The US is already incomparably better than China. This is my main issue with your argument. Sure, China is still worse, I acknowledge that, my argument is that the U.S. is not as much better as many, including you, probably think. You have a much more direct impact on the U.S. and making it better than you have on China. Diluting yourself into thinking the U.S. is already essentially "the good guys" prevents you from having the will to actively improve it and over time leads to the fact of it being not as far from China as you'd like. The world already thinks of America as the bigger threat to world peace, you can keep telling yourself what you want, but the rest of the world has a much less rosy picture of the U.S. than you'd think and the best way to keep China from "taking over" is not to ban TikTok but to work hard to improve that image.