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This discussion ( https://youtu.be/Q9s6YggbTk4?t=65 https://youtu.be/Q9s6YggbTk4?t=65 ) with Azerbaijan president summarizes really well Western democracy (or

This discussion ( https://youtu.be/Q9s6YggbTk4?t=65 https://youtu.be/Q9s6YggbTk4?t=65 ) with Azerbaijan president summarizes really well Western democracy (or hypocrisy or lets invent a new name capitalocrisy). When it comes to China, everyone is impotent taking actions, because they rely on China too much, when it comes to country like Kazakhstan or any other smaller country, everyone seem to become powerful and create sanctions. Thank you UN for not being able to do your job! UPD: it makes me sad so many Uighur people detained in camps, it is like living in 12th century, how this is happening in 21st century, beyond my understanding. People seem to forgive anything if they can get things little cheaper

f6v 6y ago
> it is like living in 12th century It’s more like 21st century where people of color and members of marginalized communities are forced to live in ghettos. No financial stability, prejudice, and violence.
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  > where people of color and members of marginalized communities are forced to live in ghettos. You mean poor people.
varjag 6y ago
While I'm on the same page with you re China, it doesn't mean that actions should not be taken where they could be afforded by political realities. China and Russia gain strength in network effects of growing illiberal alliances, and taking the smaller fish helps.
- shakow 6y ago
  I'm afraid the only thing such one-sided actions will do is to throw them in the arms of Russia and China.
  - varjag 6y ago
    It's quite an assumption they aren't there.
- xfitm3 6y ago
  Russia is not a modern enemy. Really. It's bullshit rhetoric parroted by the media and citizens who don't know much about the country. My wife is Russian and while there is a lot of poverty it's a great country.
  - tuyguntn 6y ago
    I support this sentiment (even though I hate Putin). Anytime cyber attack, breach or violation happens inside American companies, some how Russian hackers are involved. Is this really true? How come election is manipulated by Russian when Trump elected, but not when Biden elected? Why Twitter is not considered as an enemy of American people when they are censoring content as they wish?
    - varjag 6y ago
      Putin supports Trump as fellow illiberal soul, and is very much opposed to pro-democracy Biden. This is why he is helping Trump and does not help Biden. What Twitter should be considered is irrelevant to the fact that Russia assumes itself at war with United States.
      - h_anna_h 6y ago
        looks at the 1996 Russian election (as well as the other elections that the US has hijacked) I do not know if "Russia assumes itself at war with United States" or if the US assumes itself at war with literally everyone else (they were even caught spying on their own european "allies").
        varjag 6y ago
        The outcome of 1996 elections is the result of Russia's own political process, which can sometimes be very ugly entirely independently of anyone else. Although it's clear who America rooted for then they had very little if any influence on the ground. Either way, Putin is Yeltsin's creature. He has no reason to be disappointed with 1996 election outcome.
        6y ago
- AniseAbyss 6y ago
  The smaller fish will turn to China to provide them with the technology the West denies them. Every year the old world order crumbles a little more.
sofixa 6y ago
> This discussion ( https://youtu.be/Q9s6YggbTk4?t=65 https://youtu.be/Q9s6YggbTk4?t=65 ) with Azerbaijan president summarizes really well Western democracy (or hypocrisy or lets invent a new name capitalocrisy Since when are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla examples of "Western democracy" ( as if that is some monolithic entity..)? They are private companies, and can do as they like within the legal frameworks they operate in. Of course everyone is impotent taking actions against big, powerful, rich, heavily armed, strategically important countries. Who can say anything to China, and even more mundane - Saudi Arabia, Turkey, ffs, USA, UK, France, etc. and try to impose it? War is out of the question ( your population would probably be against it, and attacking nuclear powers isn't really a good idea; for the non-nuclear powers, they're still heavily armed, so you're still looking at a costly military affair), and economic sanctions will probably be more crippling for your country than them, and will probably strengthen their dictators' position ( country X is our enemy and doesn't want us to succeed!). The UN isn't the world police, and can't be. It's based on all countries participating together, and complying to rules set together. The consensus can't work against countries with veto powers ( but they wouldn't have joined otherwise), or against dictators that don't care or can find a workaround/allies that will support them anyways, thus making UN decisions impossible or inapplicable. What do you think can any world leader do? Would you support your country, whichever it is, going to nuclear war against China to free the Uighurs and kill millions in the process? Would your fellow co-citizens when that means a crash of the economy, massive job loses, serious lack of all sorts of products, not to mention all the dead and maimed soldiers? If you think a trade war might work, it probably won't, and would still heavily impact the world's economy, with countries with debts to China and Chinese-operated companies/infrastructure being caught in the crossfire. Be realistic. The only thing that can stop China is China itself.
- tuyguntn 6y ago
  > The only thing that can stop China is China itself. Why this sentiment is not applied to Russia then? instead of making sanctions, countries can say, only thing that can stop Russia is Russia itself, same should have been applied to war in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and any other war happened in 20th century. If you turn deaf to world, world will make you deaf. I think economy almost survived huge pandemic, this proves taking radical actions is possible, yes it will impact lots of people, but end result could be best for humanity. I know people individually can not boycott Chinese products, because more people, more difficult to come to consensus, there will be excuses anyway. But, western government can come to consensus and decide not to buy anything, literally anything from China, this will hurt really hard everyone (people living in China, in big economies and everyone else). If this action will take place, then history will remember it and anyone who wants to work against human rights will know there will be huge hurting actions.
lmilcin 6y ago
I am surprised (not really...) this is any news to anybody. It has always been true that the strong one was able to impose on a weaker one and that strong ones had to tolerate themselves up to a point. It is true in private life as well as in foreign relations.
- zpeti 6y ago
  What's amazing is how true this is culturally and for discourse as well, for me. With the amount of activism now happening in the western world, it's amazing that it's not against China or other abusers of human rights. No, it's usually against your own country which is multiples better to live in than somewhere like China from an oppression point of view, yet it's taken decades to even get it into the conversation. It's literally taken concentration camps of muslims for even a mild interest to take place in big media organisations about whether China is a decent place or not. And I'm not saying they should cover it. They're free to do what they want. But claiming to be activists against tyranny and oppression while ignoring china is very hypocritical. Where are the calls for boycotts? Where are the kneeling sportsman? Where are the protests?
  - as0dasdgsf 6y ago
    Of course if you've thought this far you've determined the answers - the media and their activists are politically motivated. Presenting as activists against tyranny and oppression is part of a strategy, they want to attract and exploit people who hold those values. These strategists and politicians think in terms of achieving outcomes and are more cynical than most can imagine.
  - ithinkso 6y ago
    Don't use 'it is worse over there' as a counterargument against someone who fights (rightfully or not) for things to be better 'here'.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    So I should not fix a leak in my roof because Steve’s house down the street is flooded and I should be happy that my bedroom is still dry? So, succinctly: 1) Ultimately, what happens in another country is that country’s problem. Sometimes we ought to intervene, but the bar needs to be very high. Intervention most of the time leads to outcomes ranging from bad to catastrophic. 2) I am entitled to participate in how my country is run, and I owe to future generations to help improve it as much as I reasonably can. I’ll let you piece 1 and 2 together.
xfitm3 6y ago
Send a few ICBMs to China and get their attention. They need to change, the CPC needs to die, and the Chinese citizens to realize censorship should never be normalized.
- f6v 6y ago
  > Send a few ICBMs Just out of curiosity, did that work with Iraq, Lybia etc. I really do want to know.
  - short_sells_poo 6y ago
    I mean the whole idea is preposterous. I really can't tell if the parent is being serious. "Yes let's murder hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) of people. That'll surely make the survivors sympathetic to our cause".
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      Maybe they are merely suggesting that the US bribe some officials by giving them ICBMs? Not sure how that's supposed to work either...
  - numpad0 6y ago
    The parent comment is flagged but I think the answer is yes, that those offenses did serve the near term national interest of the US at those times.
piokoch 6y ago
"People seem to forgive anything if they can get things little cheaper" - the problem is way deeper now. There are some products that does not have non-Chinese equivalents now (even more expensive), some products are not produced in China in their most expensive version (many smartphones). In addition China does majority of rare earth elements processing, needed for electronics. And the list goes on. So it is increasingly difficult to buy something 100% not produced in China.
- lotu 6y ago
  Rare earths aren't the big deal everyone thinks they are. Rare earths are more or less evenly distributed across the planet but do not form ores so you can't mine them efficiently. There is nothing about it that only China can do, they just do it the cheapest, in part because they do it an a more polluting fashion. Yes there would be massive supply socks if we lost access to the Chinese market but they would stabilize (at a higher price) in time. This is different than something like a modern CPU which China cannot produce at any price.
  - kps 6y ago
    Consider what happens if China takes Taiwan and TSMC.
    - ohazi 6y ago
      There have been rumors for years that Taiwan has arrangements to quickly destroy critical TSMC technology/equipment in the event of a mainland invasion. No doubt these whispers are spread deliberately to serve as a disincentive for attack, just like the ghost stories about automated retaliation ("Dead Hand," etc) during the Cold War / MAD era. In this case: "If you attempt to do X in order to acquire Y, a robotic, dispationate, automatic force will see to it that Y is destroyed before you can get to it. Therefore acquisition of Y is no longer a good incentive for X."
      - amelius 6y ago
        Yeah, but taking down TSMC will hit the US more than China, I suppose.
yorwba 6y ago
> when it comes to country like Kazakhstan or any other smaller country, everyone seem to become powerful and create sanctions. It's because Kazakhstan tries to man-in-the-middle attack all their citizens by making them install a government-issued root certificate, which is easy to defend against. (Just don't trust the certificate.) If they used an IP-based blocklist to filter all traffic (like China), that would be much harder to counter. As for sanctions, I haven't seen any proposed against Kazakhstan over their human-rights record (including suppression of their own Uyghur minority).
voldacar 6y ago
>it is like living in 12th century, how this is happening in 21st century because human nature hasn't appreciably changed between the 12th century and today
- ralston3 6y ago
  This hits so hard. All the technological advances, yet how much progress have we _actually_ made?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    A former British colleague of mine summarized this well: "You now have a better standard of living and can afford a car and a bigger, warmer place to live to live than one/two hundred years ago, and yet you're still a servant, except that instead of a serving a crown that can the skin off your back, you serve massive conglomerates that can take the skin off your back."
  - voldacar 6y ago
    If anything, technological progress could mask moral or social decay. Survival bias is a thing of course, but reading literature and philosophy from ancient cultures gives me a general sense that they put much more effort than we do into developing virtue and human excellence, or what the Greeks called arete
- amelius 6y ago
  The world only has become more complicated. It's far more difficult to change things now than it was in medieval times.
fhhfdfvvvvg 6y ago
Everyone is equally impotent when it comes to china as is with the us. What is happening to blacks, police brutality, corruption, war crimes and so on would have been condemned by the un and the “international community” a long time ago and perhaps sanctions would have been imposed. But as with China this cant happen because the us has money and nukes. And sadly, most americans take the worlds inaction as a sign of those issues not being that bad.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Friendly reminder that in the 12th century central governments didn't have enough power for these kinds of shenanigans and the best they could do was get a crusade going which was massively taxing on the population and not at all sustainable.
- chrchang523 6y ago
  Correct, they couldn't keep millions of people in camps, but the leading 13th century power just went ahead and killed millions of people instead (at a time when world population was much lower).
wz1000 6y ago
> Thank you UN for not being able to do your job! The UN is simply a forum for countries to meet and discuss international affairs. It is not a global governing body, and wields no power not authorized by its constituent member nations.
- Razengan 6y ago
  In The Expanse (great sci-fi novels that just got a new TV season last week), the UN becomes the governing body of Earth after some climate-related disasters that individual countries could not or would not handle (I think).
  - kergonath 6y ago
    What does it have to do with reality, though?
- young_unixer 6y ago
  From their PR discourse, they don't seem like just a forum for countries to meet and talk.
- andrewjl 6y ago
  This is an important distinction and to understand why, it's helpful to read about its predecessor, the League of Nations which due to mismanagement failed spectacularly in its goals to prevent conflicts between nation states.
disown 6y ago
> When it comes to China, everyone is impotent taking actions, because they rely on China too much Because they are a major world power. What has anyone done to stop our invasions of iraq, afghanistan, etc? What has anyone done about Britain/France and their invasion of libya? What has anyone done about Russian annexation of crimea or the EU's "annexation" of ukraine? Has nothing to do with trade. Even if we stopped trading with china, we aren't going to attack china. > Thank you UN for not being able to do your job! The UN was created by the US, Britain, France, Russia/Soviet Union and China primarily to prevent wars between US, Britain, France, Russia/Soviet Union and China. They are the 5 permanent security council members with veto powers for a reason. So the UN has actually done its job well if you understand why the UN exists. > UPD: it makes me sad so many Uighur people detained in camps What people? You mean the terrorists/separatists? By "camps", you mean prisons/detention centers? Why aren't you crying over the libyans, syrians, kurds, etc? > People seem to forgive anything if they can get things little cheaper And everyone is getting a bit tired of the "uighur" propaganda. The top comments here are literally propaganda. What happened to your lies of genocide? Funny how you people talked about "genocide" and now are beaten down to "camps". What happened to genocide? Can't really pull of that lie anymore when the uighur population has increased 10X? The chinese had detention centers for uighur terrorists/separatists for nearly 20 years now. Why are you all off a sudden "upset"? And stop hijacking threads that have nothing to do with china or uighurs to peddle your disinformation.
- yorwba 6y ago
  > The chinese had detention centers for uighur terrorists/separatists for nearly 20 years now. China has also been using forced labor as part of regular punishment for less dangerous crimes like prostitution and drug use for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai which does make it look like political calculation that the current campaign to get companies to stop using forced labor is limited to Xinjiang instead of all of China, or the rest of the world, for that matter. That doesn't mean that declaring everyone arrested a terrorist or separatist is any less propagandistic. There are plenty of perverse incentives to arrest people on trumped-up charges. Here's an article about the war on drugs in Yunnan: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef%bb%bf-forced-detox-camps-reeducation-through-labour-and-the-contradictions-of-chinas-war-on-drugs/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef... illustrating how the police are incentivized to polish their arrest quota, of drug addicts in that case. It's unlikely that police in Xinjiang are acting with any more precision and accountability in the war on terror than their colleagues in Yunnan in the war on drugs. > What happened to your lies of genocide? It's also possible that the person you're replying to never believed in the "genocide" story, but nonetheless thinks that arresting thousands of people based on mere suspicion of terrorism is unjust and unnecessary. Not everyone sorts neatly into one of two factions.
upofadown 6y ago
While I don't disagree with the idea that larger and more powerful states get cut more slack, this is an instance of fraud. Some entity is misrepresenting themselves as Facebook and the rest. This is a technical reaction to a straightforward error. Failure to react would put the entire TLS identity system at risk.

f6v 6y ago

> it is like living in 12th century It’s more like 21st century where people of color and members of marginalized communities are forced to live in ghettos. No financial stability, prejudice, and violence.

spoopyskelly 6y ago
> where people of color and members of marginalized communities are forced to live in ghettos. You mean poor people.

varjag 6y ago

While I'm on the same page with you re China, it doesn't mean that actions should not be taken where they could be afforded by political realities. China and Russia gain strength in network effects of growing illiberal alliances, and taking the smaller fish helps.

shakow 6y ago
I'm afraid the only thing such one-sided actions will do is to throw them in the arms of Russia and China.
- varjag 6y ago
  It's quite an assumption they aren't there.
xfitm3 6y ago
Russia is not a modern enemy. Really. It's bullshit rhetoric parroted by the media and citizens who don't know much about the country. My wife is Russian and while there is a lot of poverty it's a great country.
- tuyguntn 6y ago
  I support this sentiment (even though I hate Putin). Anytime cyber attack, breach or violation happens inside American companies, some how Russian hackers are involved. Is this really true? How come election is manipulated by Russian when Trump elected, but not when Biden elected? Why Twitter is not considered as an enemy of American people when they are censoring content as they wish?
  - varjag 6y ago
    Putin supports Trump as fellow illiberal soul, and is very much opposed to pro-democracy Biden. This is why he is helping Trump and does not help Biden. What Twitter should be considered is irrelevant to the fact that Russia assumes itself at war with United States.
    - h_anna_h 6y ago
      looks at the 1996 Russian election (as well as the other elections that the US has hijacked) I do not know if "Russia assumes itself at war with United States" or if the US assumes itself at war with literally everyone else (they were even caught spying on their own european "allies").
      - varjag 6y ago
        The outcome of 1996 elections is the result of Russia's own political process, which can sometimes be very ugly entirely independently of anyone else. Although it's clear who America rooted for then they had very little if any influence on the ground. Either way, Putin is Yeltsin's creature. He has no reason to be disappointed with 1996 election outcome.
      - 6y ago
AniseAbyss 6y ago
The smaller fish will turn to China to provide them with the technology the West denies them. Every year the old world order crumbles a little more.

sofixa 6y ago

> This discussion ( https://youtu.be/Q9s6YggbTk4?t=65 https://youtu.be/Q9s6YggbTk4?t=65 ) with Azerbaijan president summarizes really well Western democracy (or hypocrisy or lets invent a new name capitalocrisy Since when are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla examples of "Western democracy" ( as if that is some monolithic entity..)? They are private companies, and can do as they like within the legal frameworks they operate in. Of course everyone is impotent taking actions against big, powerful, rich, heavily armed, strategically important countries. Who can say anything to China, and even more mundane - Saudi Arabia, Turkey, ffs, USA, UK, France, etc. and try to impose it? War is out of the question ( your population would probably be against it, and attacking nuclear powers isn't really a good idea; for the non-nuclear powers, they're still heavily armed, so you're still looking at a costly military affair), and economic sanctions will probably be more crippling for your country than them, and will probably strengthen their dictators' position ( country X is our enemy and doesn't want us to succeed!). The UN isn't the world police, and can't be. It's based on all countries participating together, and complying to rules set together. The consensus can't work against countries with veto powers ( but they wouldn't have joined otherwise), or against dictators that don't care or can find a workaround/allies that will support them anyways, thus making UN decisions impossible or inapplicable. What do you think can any world leader do? Would you support your country, whichever it is, going to nuclear war against China to free the Uighurs and kill millions in the process? Would your fellow co-citizens when that means a crash of the economy, massive job loses, serious lack of all sorts of products, not to mention all the dead and maimed soldiers? If you think a trade war might work, it probably won't, and would still heavily impact the world's economy, with countries with debts to China and Chinese-operated companies/infrastructure being caught in the crossfire. Be realistic. The only thing that can stop China is China itself.

tuyguntn 6y ago
> The only thing that can stop China is China itself. Why this sentiment is not applied to Russia then? instead of making sanctions, countries can say, only thing that can stop Russia is Russia itself, same should have been applied to war in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and any other war happened in 20th century. If you turn deaf to world, world will make you deaf. I think economy almost survived huge pandemic, this proves taking radical actions is possible, yes it will impact lots of people, but end result could be best for humanity. I know people individually can not boycott Chinese products, because more people, more difficult to come to consensus, there will be excuses anyway. But, western government can come to consensus and decide not to buy anything, literally anything from China, this will hurt really hard everyone (people living in China, in big economies and everyone else). If this action will take place, then history will remember it and anyone who wants to work against human rights will know there will be huge hurting actions.

lmilcin 6y ago

I am surprised (not really...) this is any news to anybody. It has always been true that the strong one was able to impose on a weaker one and that strong ones had to tolerate themselves up to a point. It is true in private life as well as in foreign relations.

zpeti 6y ago
What's amazing is how true this is culturally and for discourse as well, for me. With the amount of activism now happening in the western world, it's amazing that it's not against China or other abusers of human rights. No, it's usually against your own country which is multiples better to live in than somewhere like China from an oppression point of view, yet it's taken decades to even get it into the conversation. It's literally taken concentration camps of muslims for even a mild interest to take place in big media organisations about whether China is a decent place or not. And I'm not saying they should cover it. They're free to do what they want. But claiming to be activists against tyranny and oppression while ignoring china is very hypocritical. Where are the calls for boycotts? Where are the kneeling sportsman? Where are the protests?
- as0dasdgsf 6y ago
  Of course if you've thought this far you've determined the answers - the media and their activists are politically motivated. Presenting as activists against tyranny and oppression is part of a strategy, they want to attract and exploit people who hold those values. These strategists and politicians think in terms of achieving outcomes and are more cynical than most can imagine.
- ithinkso 6y ago
  Don't use 'it is worse over there' as a counterargument against someone who fights (rightfully or not) for things to be better 'here'.
- kergonath 6y ago
  So I should not fix a leak in my roof because Steve’s house down the street is flooded and I should be happy that my bedroom is still dry? So, succinctly: 1) Ultimately, what happens in another country is that country’s problem. Sometimes we ought to intervene, but the bar needs to be very high. Intervention most of the time leads to outcomes ranging from bad to catastrophic. 2) I am entitled to participate in how my country is run, and I owe to future generations to help improve it as much as I reasonably can. I’ll let you piece 1 and 2 together.

xfitm3 6y ago

Send a few ICBMs to China and get their attention. They need to change, the CPC needs to die, and the Chinese citizens to realize censorship should never be normalized.

f6v 6y ago
> Send a few ICBMs Just out of curiosity, did that work with Iraq, Lybia etc. I really do want to know.
- short_sells_poo 6y ago
  I mean the whole idea is preposterous. I really can't tell if the parent is being serious. "Yes let's murder hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) of people. That'll surely make the survivors sympathetic to our cause".
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    Maybe they are merely suggesting that the US bribe some officials by giving them ICBMs? Not sure how that's supposed to work either...
- numpad0 6y ago
  The parent comment is flagged but I think the answer is yes, that those offenses did serve the near term national interest of the US at those times.

piokoch 6y ago

"People seem to forgive anything if they can get things little cheaper" - the problem is way deeper now. There are some products that does not have non-Chinese equivalents now (even more expensive), some products are not produced in China in their most expensive version (many smartphones). In addition China does majority of rare earth elements processing, needed for electronics. And the list goes on. So it is increasingly difficult to buy something 100% not produced in China.

lotu 6y ago
Rare earths aren't the big deal everyone thinks they are. Rare earths are more or less evenly distributed across the planet but do not form ores so you can't mine them efficiently. There is nothing about it that only China can do, they just do it the cheapest, in part because they do it an a more polluting fashion. Yes there would be massive supply socks if we lost access to the Chinese market but they would stabilize (at a higher price) in time. This is different than something like a modern CPU which China cannot produce at any price.
- kps 6y ago
  Consider what happens if China takes Taiwan and TSMC.
  - ohazi 6y ago
    There have been rumors for years that Taiwan has arrangements to quickly destroy critical TSMC technology/equipment in the event of a mainland invasion. No doubt these whispers are spread deliberately to serve as a disincentive for attack, just like the ghost stories about automated retaliation ("Dead Hand," etc) during the Cold War / MAD era. In this case: "If you attempt to do X in order to acquire Y, a robotic, dispationate, automatic force will see to it that Y is destroyed before you can get to it. Therefore acquisition of Y is no longer a good incentive for X."
    - amelius 6y ago
      Yeah, but taking down TSMC will hit the US more than China, I suppose.

yorwba 6y ago

> when it comes to country like Kazakhstan or any other smaller country, everyone seem to become powerful and create sanctions. It's because Kazakhstan tries to man-in-the-middle attack all their citizens by making them install a government-issued root certificate, which is easy to defend against. (Just don't trust the certificate.) If they used an IP-based blocklist to filter all traffic (like China), that would be much harder to counter. As for sanctions, I haven't seen any proposed against Kazakhstan over their human-rights record (including suppression of their own Uyghur minority).

voldacar 6y ago

>it is like living in 12th century, how this is happening in 21st century because human nature hasn't appreciably changed between the 12th century and today

ralston3 6y ago
This hits so hard. All the technological advances, yet how much progress have we _actually_ made?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  A former British colleague of mine summarized this well: "You now have a better standard of living and can afford a car and a bigger, warmer place to live to live than one/two hundred years ago, and yet you're still a servant, except that instead of a serving a crown that can the skin off your back, you serve massive conglomerates that can take the skin off your back."
- voldacar 6y ago
  If anything, technological progress could mask moral or social decay. Survival bias is a thing of course, but reading literature and philosophy from ancient cultures gives me a general sense that they put much more effort than we do into developing virtue and human excellence, or what the Greeks called arete
amelius 6y ago
The world only has become more complicated. It's far more difficult to change things now than it was in medieval times.

fhhfdfvvvvg 6y ago

Everyone is equally impotent when it comes to china as is with the us. What is happening to blacks, police brutality, corruption, war crimes and so on would have been condemned by the un and the “international community” a long time ago and perhaps sanctions would have been imposed. But as with China this cant happen because the us has money and nukes. And sadly, most americans take the worlds inaction as a sign of those issues not being that bad.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

Friendly reminder that in the 12th century central governments didn't have enough power for these kinds of shenanigans and the best they could do was get a crusade going which was massively taxing on the population and not at all sustainable.

chrchang523 6y ago
Correct, they couldn't keep millions of people in camps, but the leading 13th century power just went ahead and killed millions of people instead (at a time when world population was much lower).

wz1000 6y ago

> Thank you UN for not being able to do your job! The UN is simply a forum for countries to meet and discuss international affairs. It is not a global governing body, and wields no power not authorized by its constituent member nations.

Razengan 6y ago
In The Expanse (great sci-fi novels that just got a new TV season last week), the UN becomes the governing body of Earth after some climate-related disasters that individual countries could not or would not handle (I think).
- kergonath 6y ago
  What does it have to do with reality, though?
young_unixer 6y ago
From their PR discourse, they don't seem like just a forum for countries to meet and talk.
andrewjl 6y ago
This is an important distinction and to understand why, it's helpful to read about its predecessor, the League of Nations which due to mismanagement failed spectacularly in its goals to prevent conflicts between nation states.

disown 6y ago

> When it comes to China, everyone is impotent taking actions, because they rely on China too much Because they are a major world power. What has anyone done to stop our invasions of iraq, afghanistan, etc? What has anyone done about Britain/France and their invasion of libya? What has anyone done about Russian annexation of crimea or the EU's "annexation" of ukraine? Has nothing to do with trade. Even if we stopped trading with china, we aren't going to attack china. > Thank you UN for not being able to do your job! The UN was created by the US, Britain, France, Russia/Soviet Union and China primarily to prevent wars between US, Britain, France, Russia/Soviet Union and China. They are the 5 permanent security council members with veto powers for a reason. So the UN has actually done its job well if you understand why the UN exists. > UPD: it makes me sad so many Uighur people detained in camps What people? You mean the terrorists/separatists? By "camps", you mean prisons/detention centers? Why aren't you crying over the libyans, syrians, kurds, etc? > People seem to forgive anything if they can get things little cheaper And everyone is getting a bit tired of the "uighur" propaganda. The top comments here are literally propaganda. What happened to your lies of genocide? Funny how you people talked about "genocide" and now are beaten down to "camps". What happened to genocide? Can't really pull of that lie anymore when the uighur population has increased 10X? The chinese had detention centers for uighur terrorists/separatists for nearly 20 years now. Why are you all off a sudden "upset"? And stop hijacking threads that have nothing to do with china or uighurs to peddle your disinformation.

yorwba 6y ago
> The chinese had detention centers for uighur terrorists/separatists for nearly 20 years now. China has also been using forced labor as part of regular punishment for less dangerous crimes like prostitution and drug use for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai which does make it look like political calculation that the current campaign to get companies to stop using forced labor is limited to Xinjiang instead of all of China, or the rest of the world, for that matter. That doesn't mean that declaring everyone arrested a terrorist or separatist is any less propagandistic. There are plenty of perverse incentives to arrest people on trumped-up charges. Here's an article about the war on drugs in Yunnan: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef%bb%bf-forced-detox-camps-reeducation-through-labour-and-the-contradictions-of-chinas-war-on-drugs/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef... illustrating how the police are incentivized to polish their arrest quota, of drug addicts in that case. It's unlikely that police in Xinjiang are acting with any more precision and accountability in the war on terror than their colleagues in Yunnan in the war on drugs. > What happened to your lies of genocide? It's also possible that the person you're replying to never believed in the "genocide" story, but nonetheless thinks that arresting thousands of people based on mere suspicion of terrorism is unjust and unnecessary. Not everyone sorts neatly into one of two factions.

upofadown 6y ago

While I don't disagree with the idea that larger and more powerful states get cut more slack, this is an instance of fraud. Some entity is misrepresenting themselves as Facebook and the rest. This is a technical reaction to a straightforward error. Failure to react would put the entire TLS identity system at risk.