8 ms·

I'm trying not to be inflammatory. China is a totalitarian regime, they have no check and balances keeping them from using all this power they've been amassing

by Pmop 5y ago

I'm trying not to be inflammatory. China is a totalitarian regime, they have no check and balances keeping them from using all this power they've been amassing to accomplish any kind of goals they have. It's completely different from the US or any other democracy, which have these mechanisms in place to undermine themselves once they start to do evil stuff with their power, and I'm not saying that it's OK to democracies have this kind of power. There's no stop button for China and I wonder when will we (I'm not American) change our standing against this.

throwaway21_ 5y ago
Sure, I clearly remember how Bush Jr. along Cheney, Powel and Rumsfeld went to court and were imprisoned for life for all the misery they inflicted. Oh, wait...
- adventured 5y ago
  We also didn't put FDR in prison for the misery he caused the Germans or Japanese. I don't recall FDR asking their permission to invade or bomb them. And we didn't put Truman into prison for the misery he caused the Koreans. FDR's actions killed more innocent civilians than the Iraq War did. That's not whataboutism or misdirection, I plainly dislike Bush & Co., they're all monsters. The US should not have invaded Iraq, it wasn't in the US self-interest to do so, it was a wildly irrational choice. And yet the context is a lot more complex than you're suggesting. Saddam is gone. Iraq is a fledgling democracy, which was unthinkable 25 years ago, and their oil output is persistently near record highs. Iraq has a GDP per capita higher than Indonesia, the Philippines, Jordan, Egypt. And not far from South Africa or Paraguay. It's not a total disaster at present, they legitimately have a chance to build something there in the coming decades. These two things are simultaneously true: Iraq's future prospects are better because the US invaded, and the US should not have invaded. The Korean War involved dramatically more misery than Iraq did. Millions of people died in just a few years. Ask the South Koreans if they would prefer that the Kim family were ruling over them while they exist in absolute poverty today. Isn't it just fascinating how today nobody dares to proclaim that the US should have left North Korea to conquer and rule South Korea, that that would have been the obvious better outcome vs the misery they went through for decades after the war. No, people wouldn't dare to say that, but they'll say it about Iraq, because it's a convenient stick to beat the US with. If Iraq's fortunes improve in the coming decades, those same people will go largely silent on the matter and the narrative will be modified (go back and read how the narrative on the Korean War changed across the decades as South Korea's situation radically improved). The people of Iraq have a chance to chart their own course democratically. The US doesn't rule Iraq, we didn't take their oil, we didn't annex their territory. We lost two trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers trying to stop them from killing eachother in a religious war. The situation in Iraq is very far from perfect, so what, the lack of perfection isn't a valid counter argument; the situation in South Korea after the Korean War was very very far from perfect for decades. Even the US was a basketcase for decades after its founding. It was held together by a string, ultimately culminating in a very bloody civil war as well. It took decades for South Korea to build up the structures necessary to sustain itself as a democracy and lift the standard of living of its people. They were still poor as recently as the early 1980s. Why is it that people think Iraq should have been instantly transformed into a mecca? That's a level of expectation nobody would dare apply to any other similar context. As though the end of Saddam's rule was somehow going to be soft and fluffy, rather than involving misery. There was no other scenario than to go through misery given the sectarian split in Iraq and the way Iraq was being ruled, it was always going to prompt a civil war. The issue is that the US was involved. It's an easy point that can be used to hit the US with. How can I be sure of that? Well, simple, consider the alternative. The opposite position is: condemn the people of Iraq to living under Saddam and his sadistic family (or the equivalent). I'll note that was a minority political group oppressing and torturing a far larger majority group through a brutal totalitarian system with zero human rights. Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that? I'd challenge someone to dare to say that right now and then back it up as the better alternative to the present (that's not what would happen of course; a person will instead proclaim a fantasy scenario of fluffy bunnies and utopia where glorious happiness and peace would shine from the sky magically and all the conflicting groups in Iraq would hold a love-in and Saddam would have just willingly retired as dictator-for-life and then there would have been no civil war in the aftermath and instead it would have been an organic gentle process). I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better if the US hadn't rescued South Korea from being enslaved by North Korea's Kim Dynasty. Because that's exactly what people so often openly proclaim about the Iraq situation, including its majority Shia and minority Kurds who were brutalized by Saddam. The US shouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq, it should have never invaded Iraq. However the prospects for the people of Iraq are not worse today than they were under Saddam's reign of terror. And it's entirely an intellectual con that Iraq was supposedly stable under Saddam (one of the few arguments frequently thrown out in support of the Saddam scenario). Iraq was extraordinarily unstable under Saddam, which is why he had to constantly murder and purge people. When you have actual stability you don't have to slaughter and torture people; Saddam had to do that constantly to prevent his system from collapsing due to its inherent instability.
  - babycake 5y ago
    The problem with the theme that the US went in to 'save' countries under a repressive state is that it's simply untrue. Why would the US just go in to save people? Given its war crimes exposed by Assange and its crimes against its own people by Snowden, it's clear the US doesn't operate with angelic purposes. There is always an economic and idealogical benefit to the US when the US invades or goes to war. Whether that's to benefit senator's private war industry, or to install a US-friendly puppet, history shows us it's definitely not due to pure altruism.
  - ericns 5y ago
    Why did we owe the Iraqis thousands of our soldiers lives and a couple trillion dollars? You morally justified all this by concluding we improved the situation of Iraqis? What currency is their oil sold in? What companies discover and drill for it? I bet most are subsidiaries of Western corps. I did a google, looks like it's Exxon and Schlumberger International getting 96 new wells as of June 2021 (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/exxonmobil-basrah-oil-ink-deal-to-drill-wells-in-west-qurna-1-2021-06-18 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/exxonmobil-basrah-oil-ink-de...) "Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that?" I condemn them to figure out their own future, do what's necessary and proper to attain it - whether it be suffer under Saddam or overthrow him is for the Iraqi people to decide. Not American politicians and intelligence services you seem to be a sycophant for. "I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better..." False choice, get better at your moral justifications. Going to address the way the US public was lied into the Iraq Pillaging? You compare the Pillaging of Iraq with the Korean War - one had an aggressor (KPA crossed the line a thing that actually happened to instigate the war) and we had obligations to the First Republic of Korea. The US had and has no obligations to the Iraqi people, we just lied about Iraq and Saddam's relation to terrorists so the American ruling class could do it's thing. I can't get passed this post boiling down to "we shouldn't have gone, but we did and Iraq is better for it" You completely fail to address the opportunity costs involved from the US side. Who are you trying to convince with this moral justification for invading Iraq, yourself? I'll chop a hand off if Iraq becomes anything like South Korea before 2100.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> It's completely different from the US What a laughable notion. Utter the words "national security" and all your checks and balances go right out the window. There are also no checks and balances for non-US citizens: it is free to violate my non-existent rights as much as it wants.
- andrewzah 5y ago
  Neither are perfect, so both are the same? Sorry, but that's just not the reality. For starters, one can say "F Trump" or "F Biden" without getting disappeared. There -are- systems to hold the powers-at-be accountable. The way issues are handled in these countries are completely different. I'm tired of this whatboutism used to excuse completely appalling behavior with -zero- checks and balances at all. Country A doing bad thing doesn't excuse Country B from doing a much worse thing.
  - Sr_developer 5y ago
    The big majority of the chinese prefer to live under their current system. The fact you are a white, american male in tech does not make your opinion worthier, more intelligent or the moral compass. For many people the US is a barbaric state who humiliates and kill their non-white population and it is a imperialistic juggernaut who stops at nothing (they can kill hundreds of thousand of children with no remose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8YQ8gKIV8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8YQ8gKIV8U ) to get what they want. So I would stop with the moralizing, nobody with 2 cells will buy it.
    - andrewzah 5y ago
      This is not only whataboutism but also an ad hominem attack. I don't know why you think I would excuse the USA's actions, both now and in the past. "Many people want to live in X" is not a strong argument- many people want to live in the US as well... now we've gotten nowhere. My point above is not that the US is above reproach, but that it isn't disapppearing its citizens for criticizing the government or practicing different religions or being of a specific ethnicity. Etc. To say the two countries are "equally bad" is a pro-ccp propaganda point.
vbtemp 5y ago
Yeah, especially on HN there's lots of whataboutism. As you can see from other responses you got, a lot of people get really defensive for China and are very eager to carry water for them - for apparently no reason. For them, the US has to be the worst offender, and if some other nation does equal or worse - they need to jump in as keyboard commandos to go to bat to make sure it's clear the US is public enemy #1. It was kind of true in 2003, of course, but the world has changed so much and their talking points haven't.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Yeah, especially on HN there's lots of whataboutism. As you can see from other responses you got, a lot of people get really defensive for China and are very eager to carry water for them - for apparently no reason. I was arguing with someone about a fringe website the other day, and I think I finally understand the thought process a lot of these people have. I think many are people who are strongly and habitually opposed to something (in this case, US injustices) have that opposition warp their perception of other things (especially things "opposed" to the US). Sometimes that means they see discussion of other injustices carried out by US adversaries as a distraction to be fought. Other times, that means denying and defending against accusations of injustice against a US opponent. In extreme cases, it means starting to explicitly support those opponents, even through they're arguably worse on almost every value axis these people started with. tl;dr: anti-imperialists who oppose the US imperialism can sometimes become defenders of imperialism done by US adversaries. This is article that helped me realize this: https://newpol.org/against-the-grayzone-slanders/ https://newpol.org/against-the-grayzone-slanders/: > During the Vietnam War, opposition to the United States and support for national self-determination for the Vietnamese among young activists sometimes developed into support for the Vietnamese Communist Party and its leader. One often heard at the protest demonstrations, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Going to Win.” While this drift from opposition to the U.S. government to support for the Vietnamese government was understandable as a gut reaction to the horrors of the U.S. war, it was also very problematic. Most people chanted this slogan naively, but some gradually became supporters of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist government, and of the Soviet Union that was backing it. Few in the movement pointed out that Ho and the Vietnamese Communists were Stalinists who had murdered their leftist competitors and strove to construct a Soviet-style state in Vietnam, which is eventually what happened.
yeetman21 5y ago
NSA at it again with the psy-ops

by Pmop 5y ago

throwaway21_ 5y ago

Sure, I clearly remember how Bush Jr. along Cheney, Powel and Rumsfeld went to court and were imprisoned for life for all the misery they inflicted. Oh, wait...

adventured 5y ago
We also didn't put FDR in prison for the misery he caused the Germans or Japanese. I don't recall FDR asking their permission to invade or bomb them. And we didn't put Truman into prison for the misery he caused the Koreans. FDR's actions killed more innocent civilians than the Iraq War did. That's not whataboutism or misdirection, I plainly dislike Bush & Co., they're all monsters. The US should not have invaded Iraq, it wasn't in the US self-interest to do so, it was a wildly irrational choice. And yet the context is a lot more complex than you're suggesting. Saddam is gone. Iraq is a fledgling democracy, which was unthinkable 25 years ago, and their oil output is persistently near record highs. Iraq has a GDP per capita higher than Indonesia, the Philippines, Jordan, Egypt. And not far from South Africa or Paraguay. It's not a total disaster at present, they legitimately have a chance to build something there in the coming decades. These two things are simultaneously true: Iraq's future prospects are better because the US invaded, and the US should not have invaded. The Korean War involved dramatically more misery than Iraq did. Millions of people died in just a few years. Ask the South Koreans if they would prefer that the Kim family were ruling over them while they exist in absolute poverty today. Isn't it just fascinating how today nobody dares to proclaim that the US should have left North Korea to conquer and rule South Korea, that that would have been the obvious better outcome vs the misery they went through for decades after the war. No, people wouldn't dare to say that, but they'll say it about Iraq, because it's a convenient stick to beat the US with. If Iraq's fortunes improve in the coming decades, those same people will go largely silent on the matter and the narrative will be modified (go back and read how the narrative on the Korean War changed across the decades as South Korea's situation radically improved). The people of Iraq have a chance to chart their own course democratically. The US doesn't rule Iraq, we didn't take their oil, we didn't annex their territory. We lost two trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers trying to stop them from killing eachother in a religious war. The situation in Iraq is very far from perfect, so what, the lack of perfection isn't a valid counter argument; the situation in South Korea after the Korean War was very very far from perfect for decades. Even the US was a basketcase for decades after its founding. It was held together by a string, ultimately culminating in a very bloody civil war as well. It took decades for South Korea to build up the structures necessary to sustain itself as a democracy and lift the standard of living of its people. They were still poor as recently as the early 1980s. Why is it that people think Iraq should have been instantly transformed into a mecca? That's a level of expectation nobody would dare apply to any other similar context. As though the end of Saddam's rule was somehow going to be soft and fluffy, rather than involving misery. There was no other scenario than to go through misery given the sectarian split in Iraq and the way Iraq was being ruled, it was always going to prompt a civil war. The issue is that the US was involved. It's an easy point that can be used to hit the US with. How can I be sure of that? Well, simple, consider the alternative. The opposite position is: condemn the people of Iraq to living under Saddam and his sadistic family (or the equivalent). I'll note that was a minority political group oppressing and torturing a far larger majority group through a brutal totalitarian system with zero human rights. Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that? I'd challenge someone to dare to say that right now and then back it up as the better alternative to the present (that's not what would happen of course; a person will instead proclaim a fantasy scenario of fluffy bunnies and utopia where glorious happiness and peace would shine from the sky magically and all the conflicting groups in Iraq would hold a love-in and Saddam would have just willingly retired as dictator-for-life and then there would have been no civil war in the aftermath and instead it would have been an organic gentle process). I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better if the US hadn't rescued South Korea from being enslaved by North Korea's Kim Dynasty. Because that's exactly what people so often openly proclaim about the Iraq situation, including its majority Shia and minority Kurds who were brutalized by Saddam. The US shouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq, it should have never invaded Iraq. However the prospects for the people of Iraq are not worse today than they were under Saddam's reign of terror. And it's entirely an intellectual con that Iraq was supposedly stable under Saddam (one of the few arguments frequently thrown out in support of the Saddam scenario). Iraq was extraordinarily unstable under Saddam, which is why he had to constantly murder and purge people. When you have actual stability you don't have to slaughter and torture people; Saddam had to do that constantly to prevent his system from collapsing due to its inherent instability.
- babycake 5y ago
  The problem with the theme that the US went in to 'save' countries under a repressive state is that it's simply untrue. Why would the US just go in to save people? Given its war crimes exposed by Assange and its crimes against its own people by Snowden, it's clear the US doesn't operate with angelic purposes. There is always an economic and idealogical benefit to the US when the US invades or goes to war. Whether that's to benefit senator's private war industry, or to install a US-friendly puppet, history shows us it's definitely not due to pure altruism.
- ericns 5y ago
  Why did we owe the Iraqis thousands of our soldiers lives and a couple trillion dollars? You morally justified all this by concluding we improved the situation of Iraqis? What currency is their oil sold in? What companies discover and drill for it? I bet most are subsidiaries of Western corps. I did a google, looks like it's Exxon and Schlumberger International getting 96 new wells as of June 2021 (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/exxonmobil-basrah-oil-ink-deal-to-drill-wells-in-west-qurna-1-2021-06-18 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/exxonmobil-basrah-oil-ink-de...) "Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that?" I condemn them to figure out their own future, do what's necessary and proper to attain it - whether it be suffer under Saddam or overthrow him is for the Iraqi people to decide. Not American politicians and intelligence services you seem to be a sycophant for. "I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better..." False choice, get better at your moral justifications. Going to address the way the US public was lied into the Iraq Pillaging? You compare the Pillaging of Iraq with the Korean War - one had an aggressor (KPA crossed the line a thing that actually happened to instigate the war) and we had obligations to the First Republic of Korea. The US had and has no obligations to the Iraqi people, we just lied about Iraq and Saddam's relation to terrorists so the American ruling class could do it's thing. I can't get passed this post boiling down to "we shouldn't have gone, but we did and Iraq is better for it" You completely fail to address the opportunity costs involved from the US side. Who are you trying to convince with this moral justification for invading Iraq, yourself? I'll chop a hand off if Iraq becomes anything like South Korea before 2100.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> It's completely different from the US What a laughable notion. Utter the words "national security" and all your checks and balances go right out the window. There are also no checks and balances for non-US citizens: it is free to violate my non-existent rights as much as it wants.

andrewzah 5y ago
Neither are perfect, so both are the same? Sorry, but that's just not the reality. For starters, one can say "F Trump" or "F Biden" without getting disappeared. There -are- systems to hold the powers-at-be accountable. The way issues are handled in these countries are completely different. I'm tired of this whatboutism used to excuse completely appalling behavior with -zero- checks and balances at all. Country A doing bad thing doesn't excuse Country B from doing a much worse thing.
- Sr_developer 5y ago
  The big majority of the chinese prefer to live under their current system. The fact you are a white, american male in tech does not make your opinion worthier, more intelligent or the moral compass. For many people the US is a barbaric state who humiliates and kill their non-white population and it is a imperialistic juggernaut who stops at nothing (they can kill hundreds of thousand of children with no remose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8YQ8gKIV8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8YQ8gKIV8U ) to get what they want. So I would stop with the moralizing, nobody with 2 cells will buy it.
  - andrewzah 5y ago
    This is not only whataboutism but also an ad hominem attack. I don't know why you think I would excuse the USA's actions, both now and in the past. "Many people want to live in X" is not a strong argument- many people want to live in the US as well... now we've gotten nowhere. My point above is not that the US is above reproach, but that it isn't disapppearing its citizens for criticizing the government or practicing different religions or being of a specific ethnicity. Etc. To say the two countries are "equally bad" is a pro-ccp propaganda point.

vbtemp 5y ago

Yeah, especially on HN there's lots of whataboutism. As you can see from other responses you got, a lot of people get really defensive for China and are very eager to carry water for them - for apparently no reason. For them, the US has to be the worst offender, and if some other nation does equal or worse - they need to jump in as keyboard commandos to go to bat to make sure it's clear the US is public enemy #1. It was kind of true in 2003, of course, but the world has changed so much and their talking points haven't.

tablespoon 5y ago
> Yeah, especially on HN there's lots of whataboutism. As you can see from other responses you got, a lot of people get really defensive for China and are very eager to carry water for them - for apparently no reason. I was arguing with someone about a fringe website the other day, and I think I finally understand the thought process a lot of these people have. I think many are people who are strongly and habitually opposed to something (in this case, US injustices) have that opposition warp their perception of other things (especially things "opposed" to the US). Sometimes that means they see discussion of other injustices carried out by US adversaries as a distraction to be fought. Other times, that means denying and defending against accusations of injustice against a US opponent. In extreme cases, it means starting to explicitly support those opponents, even through they're arguably worse on almost every value axis these people started with. tl;dr: anti-imperialists who oppose the US imperialism can sometimes become defenders of imperialism done by US adversaries. This is article that helped me realize this: https://newpol.org/against-the-grayzone-slanders/ https://newpol.org/against-the-grayzone-slanders/: > During the Vietnam War, opposition to the United States and support for national self-determination for the Vietnamese among young activists sometimes developed into support for the Vietnamese Communist Party and its leader. One often heard at the protest demonstrations, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Going to Win.” While this drift from opposition to the U.S. government to support for the Vietnamese government was understandable as a gut reaction to the horrors of the U.S. war, it was also very problematic. Most people chanted this slogan naively, but some gradually became supporters of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist government, and of the Soviet Union that was backing it. Few in the movement pointed out that Ho and the Vietnamese Communists were Stalinists who had murdered their leftist competitors and strove to construct a Soviet-style state in Vietnam, which is eventually what happened.

yeetman21 5y ago

NSA at it again with the psy-ops