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This is just an example of the different ethics between China and America. America is very deontological in terms of FREEDOM. We love freedom above everything e

This is just an example of the different ethics between China and America. America is very deontological in terms of FREEDOM. We love freedom above everything else. China is very consequentialist, they care about prosperity and success over everything else. I'm a pretty red blooded American (I drive a black smoke diesel truck and have enough firearms and ammo to make it pretty far in the apocalypse). I wonder what ethical system will be more successful in the future. We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics. The Chinese know that Tiananmen Square was a bad thing, but they want to forget about it and move on (consequentialism). In America our Tiananmen Square is probably slavery and we apparently don't want to forget about it even if it rips our county apart (deontological). What system will succeed in the next 100 years? The pandemic really showed me some of the issues of Western deontological ethics.

peatmoss 5y ago
We have to also consider the ethical framing of “success.” Perhaps success is ripping the country apart rather than forgetting the moral blight of slavery. Truthfully, I don’t have a good answer here myself beyond, “uh, something in between willful forgetting and never ending cross-group animus.”
colinmhayes 5y ago
Completely disagree with your portrayal of consequentialism. Freedom absolutely provides utility, and allowing the government to disappear people who disagree with it is in no way a path to maximizing utility.
- Bayesian_bro 5y ago
  The American government "disappears" many people by locking them up in the criminal justice system. It's just for slightly different reasons.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    Slightly different? Who is in prison for something "slightly different" than publicly accusing a government official of rape?
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    You understand that when you disappear someone, it means that you have no idea what happened to them.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      Now that this is moving the goal posts. Lots of people go missing and die for unknown reasons, including non-violent ones. The issue with "disappearing" is that it is done by coordinated groups (including the prison-industrial complex). It is not that we don't know precisely how the victims got hurt.
  - dionidium 5y ago
    This comparison is risible. First of all, you actually do have to commit a crime to go to prison, in the vast majority of cases. Second, the details of your trial (and appeal) are public. The "mass incarceration" meme has been too successful for it's own good, so successful that people seem earnestly to believe that most prisoners are innocent or there for spurious reasons, but it's simply not the case. The median state prisoner in the U.S. is a violent offender with a long rap sheet.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >The median state prisoner in the U.S. is a violent offender with a long rap sheet. source?
      - dionidium 5y ago
        As the chart here shows, violent offenders are the largest category of prisoners: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html This chart reveals a lot of problems with our system. Are too many people in jail for drugs? Sure, probably. (But it's nowhere near the largest category.) Do we have a big problem with getting people in local jails to speedy trials? Yes, absolutely. Are our sentences too long? Yes, in some cases. But most people in prison committed a serious crime. I don't have the data on the "long rap sheet" portion of my claim, though I would encourage you to look out for it every time there's a news story about a high-profile arrest. The list of previous crimes in most cases would be comical if it weren't so tragic. Additionally, studies of released inmates show very high recidivism rates. One study showed that, "401,288 state prisoners released in 2005 had 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period, an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner". Source: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisoner-recidivism-9-year-follow-period-2005-2014 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...
- merpnderp 5y ago
  I don't think you're down in the weeds enough. China does have freedom to a degree. Obviously there's lots of ways where they have zero freedom also. But it certainly looks like the CCP is attempting to maximize freedom where it provides utility and minimize it where it hurts their goals or prosperity. I vehemently disagree with that stance, but I do want acknowledge the CCP's actual stance.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Disappearing people who accuse the government/government officials of wrongdoing will never maximize utility.
    - marderfarker2 5y ago
      I think you will disappear if you offend anyone too powerful, even in first worlds/democratic countries.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      I think that is a weak argument and difficult or impossible to prove. The better argument is against utilitarianism itself. Humans deserve some rights even if it means less utility.
asib 5y ago
Are you genuinely comparing Tianamen Square to centuries of slavery?
- Bayesian_bro 5y ago
  The Chinese also don't talk about a lot of the bad things that happened in the great leap forward, which could have a case made that it was worse than slavery.
  - yardie 5y ago
    Is like to see what that case is? Because nothing about the Great Leap I’ve read compares to chattel slavery or the 40% losses of life in the transatlantic slave trade.
    - cloverich 5y ago
      Go read stories about neighbors eating each others children to survive. It is pointless to compare tragedies as to which is worse, but it is worthwhile to recognize the magnitude of the (unimaginable) suffering caused by bad policy. The point is you wouldn't want to experience either -- neither is a better choice, they were both disasters worthy of keeping in memory.
    - fmajid 5y ago
      In absolute number of dead, it's certainly worse, if only because of the scale of China. According to Henry Louis Gates 12.7 million Africans were abducted by the slave trade. Estimates for the Great Leap Forward are 15 to 55M dead from famine and several million more from violence. https://www.abhmuseum.org/how-many-africans-were-really-taken-to-the-u-s-during-the-slave-trade/ https://www.abhmuseum.org/how-many-africans-were-really-take...
    - nescioquid 5y ago
      The Great Leap famine that killed between 11.6 - 55 million over fours years, compared to the Atlantic slave trade with estimated deaths from 2 - 60 million (over 200 hundred years).[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic...
slothtrop 5y ago
Ostensibly consequentialist, but that is just a symptom of maintaining authority and order. Arguably many choices from the Chinese State reported in the last decade have been at the expense of prosperity and success, such as Xi consolidating power and cracking down on business leaders. Hyper centralization of power rarely works out well, and when it has, those personalities as in SK and Singapore favored Capitalism.
jvanderbot 5y ago
I liked your take on this situation and the tradeoffs, but please note I'm a red blooded American that just ordered a tesla, doesn't own guns, and couldn't tell you who won the Super Bowl last year.
- DFHippie 5y ago
  Yeah, I'd push back a bit on the "red blooded American" = "rural truck driver/gun owner" idea, at least if "red blooded American" is supposed to mean "typical American" or "indisputably American" or "American who wishes their country to flourish".
- thakoppno 5y ago
  > who won the Super Bowl last year Tom Brady is usually a good guess.
- Bayesian_bro 5y ago
  My backstory is that I used to live in SF for 10 years before this pandemic. We moved to a rural western area because of the pandemic. I need the diesel truck to tow trailers.
  - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
    You went from https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Promethea https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Promethea To https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Pandora https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Pandora
sschueller 5y ago
I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it? The time I spend in the US I had the feeling that you have more of a pseudo freedom than actual freedom. Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested. You go to a town festival and the people who want to drink are enclosed in a small area like cattle.
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  You can talk about the Tulsa race massacre. You can make TV shows depicting it. Forces may have conspired to keep it from the forefront of the American consciousness, but nobody was going around burning the books or throwing people in jail for bringing it up.
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  In the US (and most western countries), I can put up a website detailing what happened in the Tulsa race massacre with no fear of government censorship or retaliation. In China, I could not do the same with details of Tiananmen Square.
- zepto 5y ago
  The Tulsa race massacre which has been featured in pop culture and all over the press in the last few years because a lot of Americans didn’t know about it. Vs The Tiananmen Square massacre which is censored to even mention digitally in China, and state agents intimidate citizens outside China just for mentioning it. Also note that Tulsa was 100 years ago. Around the time of the birth of the CCP, which has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since that time. Tiananmen was in 1989. Any attempt to equivocate these two is utterly intellectually dishonest.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Okay so a more apt comparison would be 30 years after the Tulsa race massacre in America to see if was easier to talk about it Or 100 years after the Tianamen Square massacre in China to see if its easier to talk about it then great. very productive.
achenatx 5y ago
letting the government have total control over your life works great until someone gets in charge that does bad things. Then you get 60-80 million killed by their own government in the great leap forward.
ecopoesis 5y ago
Whitewashing history to save the economy is certainly an interesting take. Let's be clear: the reason the Chinese government wants to forget and move on from Tiananmen Square is because it threatens their power. The scariest thing for an autocrat is the people realizing that people hold the real power, and that all systems of government only exist because of the consent of the governed (implied in China's case, explicit in a democracies).
- diordiderot 5y ago
  Why does the right want to forget and move on from Tulsa massacre?
  - z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
    Why does the left want to ignore and move on from their broad racist history? What does your comment have to do when the above comment you replied to? Partisan tribalism does nothing but project your insecurities.
- carabiner 5y ago
  Yet the freedom of speech in the US hasn't prevented a gerontocracy of multimillionaires (both in government and outside of it) to preside over a servant class. We have mass incarceration in for-profit prisons whose inhabitants protect California mansions from wildfires, "gig economy workers" without health insurance, and laborers who are effectively indentured servants who cannot leave their jobs without losing health care. In every city on the west coast, the tent cities grow larger by the day. "At least we can talk about it..." Yes, talk, and talk, and talk. This has come about over decades. How many decades of "freedom" will it take to actually bring change? Could it be that endless debate on Twitter is our modern bread and circuses that will amount to nothing?
ashtonkem 5y ago
I think this is overly reductive, even if it’s largely pointed in the right direction. For example, I think the best way to interpret the pandemic isn’t through ethical systems, it’s through state capacity and competence. America didn’t fumble the pandemic because of deontological ethics, it fumbled because the federal government was just straight up incompetent. Without the federal government coordinating the crisis, every state was left to try its own strategy, which really does not work during a pandemic. Furthermore china might have eventually taken a “utilitarian” approach, but only after their first strategy of denial and repression failed. Like many authoritarian regimes China’s first interest is in their own stability, not prosperity per se. In cases where the prosperity of the citizens and the pride of the party are in conflict, China will clearly favor the latter over the former.
xwolfi 5y ago
I'm a French immigrant in China. I think you're building a fake dichotomy: as a politician in France once said, borders are the only hope we have to escape if we dont like what we have. It's fine to have many models and important we can move in between them. I agree China cares about the result now but it's probably temporary: once the middle class is proportionally more important, priorities will shift, they already have somewhat. Xi Jinping announcing in glorious pomp a new stock exchange in Beijing is, for all the flaws of the communists, sort of different from what Mao would have done. Tiananmen is not something the Chinese want to forget, but that the communists want to hide, it's a bit different. But, since there's always balance in everything, rather than throw themselves wave after wave on their bullets, they make the most of what they can get now and bide their time. If that can give you some sense of relief, I never met a pro communist Chinese, never one, who would defend the party: they only ever say stuff like "bah, we had an emperor before, it's the same with another name", hardly a support of the ideology you'll agree lol. In America your Tiananmen are the civilian deaths and war crimes in Afghanistan, and see, you forgot about them and prefered to talk about someth you reformed already, like a Chinese would say of nobility and servitude under the empire. Face your demons, if you dare :)
- brodouevencode 5y ago
  Summing up this response as > you accuse people of this while you do that Assuming this is right (and even if it's not), do not confuse the values and actions of a government with the values of its people. The CCP has gone out of its way to remove Tiananmen from history. Many bureaucrats in the US government wish they had the power to erase points in history as what the CCP wields.
tshaddox 5y ago
A very similar thing happens with “democracy.” In America it’s basically just anything that calls itself democracy and vaguely follows some notion of Western democracy is just accepted as the obvious best way to organize society. You’ll get a lot of head scratching if you ask questions like “What if it turns out that the correlation between government policies and the policy preferences of the population is stronger in some supposedly ‘undemocratic’ countries than in major Western democracies?” After the head-scratching you’ll usually get some kind of argument that strips the former population of agency, like “oh well they’re just brainwashed.” Kinda ironic for supposed proponents of democracy to strip people of their agency.
- Nevermark 5y ago
  If by 'undemocratic' you mean autocratic, it isn't proponents of democracy that are stripping them of agency. It is their form of government. However, understanding the pro's and con's of any type of government, including autocracies, is a worthy pursuit. We can learn something from anyone.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    > If by 'undemocratic' you mean autocratic, it isn't proponents of democracy that are stripping them of agency. It is their form of government. But you would need to show that they are actually being stripped of their agency. You can't just say "I declare that their government doesn't represent their preferences, and when they say that the government actually does represent their preferences, that's because they can't think for themselves." Having different preferences than you is not sufficient evidence of brainwashing. That's pretty circular, and you could just as easily say "Western democracy is bad, and anyone who lives in a Western democracy who says they like it is just brainwashed."
    - Nevermark 5y ago
      If a government severely punishes debate about its behavior or views it wants accepted and unchallenged, or has a system in place to eliminate information in the public sphere that it does not want you to encounter, through technology and overwhelming pressure on organizations and individuals, ... ... that's all you need to know. That is a situation designed precisely to stay in power despite not responding to a freely informed public's preferences. If an autocratic leader actually asked its citizens for their preferences on whether the autocrat should stay in power, and abided by the result - it would not be an autocracy.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
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citizenkeen 5y ago
Why would you describe black smoke diesel as American?
- thinkcontext 5y ago
  I believe they are referring to "rolling coal". Its the practice of modifying a diesel truck to run dirty for the purposes of directing the black cloud at someone.
- cloverich 5y ago
  They are contrasting their viewpoint by identifying some of their other traits in terms of "hard right" characterizations in a somewhat poetic manner, e.g. those that would stereotypically come from someone who would blanket condemn Chinese policy based purely on it not being America + Freedom. i.e. "If even _I_, as someone typically far away from X, think Y, then...". It would be like saying "I own five Tesla's but am a bit skeptical of this whole electric car thing because...""
bagacrap 5y ago
Americans obviously don't love freedom above all, at least not uniformly across the country. Many seem to be surprisingly willing to give it up in return for a sense of safety.
mmaunder 5y ago
Chinas pandemic outcome remains to be seen. Their zero Covid approach may prove increasingly challenging as new variants become more contagious and the rest of the world takes a maintenance approach. I think a centrally controlled society’s IQ is the sum if it’s leaders. A free society’s IQ is the sum of its people. That makes me optimistic about the prospects for the US.
- 323 5y ago
  What is the bandwidth of political leaders in US occupied by? If you can have an abortion or not, who can vote and in what conditions, if vaccines are a good thing or a bad thing. Basically issues which were settled 100 years ago in other places. Meanwhile China built thousands of miles of high-speed train in the last 10 years (while US built basically none), is about to have more navy ships than the US and so on. https://twitter.com/SpiritofHo/status/1470145473315016704 https://twitter.com/SpiritofHo/status/1470145473315016704
  - chernevik 5y ago
    The US leaves far more to people outside the government. We get stuff like Space X. China has profited greatly by allowing its people more economic autonomy, but even the most successful are subject to State control of whatever the State wants to control, whenever the State wants to control it. See Jack Ma.
- smt88 5y ago
  We will never know China's pandemic outcome because the data their govt releases is not trustworthy. Perhaps you meant only their economic outcome?
Cupertino95014 5y ago
Look at you, getting all fancy with your "deontological" and "consequentialist." Does it feel erudite to use 5 dollar words when a 10 cent word like "freedom" would do? No, actually we cannot see that "having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics." But then, we don't have police welding people's doors shut, either.
- Bayesian_bro 5y ago
  I think you need to look up what "deontological" means. It's putting a means before an end. America does this with spreading freedom. Colonial Spain did this with spreading christianity. Russia did this with spreading communism.
  - Cupertino95014 5y ago
    I know how to look up words, thanks. You do need to de-obfuscate, though.
nickysielicki 5y ago
Historically categorizing America like this might have made sense but ever since 9/11 it’s been less and less true. How else do you explain the economic response around the 2008 recession, the patriot act and everything in the Snowden leaks, our insane wars that are ostensibly not about oil futures, or the insane amount of money printing and spending in the wake of covid? I’m not even sure I’d be willing to buy the argument that China is more consequentialist than we are. I don’t think that Tiananmen Square is their slavery. When I was in high school we had a guy visit from China and I dragged him to the school library and showed him the Wikipedia page for Tiananmen Square. He’d never heard of it. Same experience when I discussed it with Chinese friends in college. It’s not because Chinese society wants to get over it — China does not have such a thing as public opinion. Don’t look at China with rose colored glasses in the context of their 2021 economy, you have to remember how backwards and broke they were just 20 years ago. It was a totalitarian regime and it’s still a totalitarian regime, just a more wealthy one. In summary, I agree that it seems like “consequentialism” has won, but it’s not the case that the two are battling it out to see which is better. Both countries independently chose consequentialism, and maybe it didn’t have to be that way.
pphysch 5y ago
To be crystal clear, the PRC does not view Tiananmen Square as a purely domestic affair. The extent to which students were radicalized, or signal-boosted by foreign influence is unclear. In that sense, a better comparison would be an event in America's history that had significant foreign interference. For example, 9/11. You can talk objectively about 9/11, sure, just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China. However, you absolutely cannot publicly glorify 9/11 and side with al-Qaeda. That will put you on watch lists and be socially shunned to the point of never getting hired by any company that can view your online comments.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  I'm not sure what to make of this comparison. You're not sure the extent to which foreign influence played a role in radicalizing people leading up to an event where Chinese citizens were massacred by the Chinese state, so it's fair to compare it to a situation where foreign nationals murdered US civilians? This is apples and oranges. Apples and Teslas. Dogs and supercomputers. They're not the same thing. > just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China Citation needed. Even researching Tiananmen Square in China gets you on watchlists.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    There is substantial evidence that Washington was involved in amplifying misinformation and possibly directing student leaders to escalate the violence. Take student leader Chai Ling, for example [1]. She is on record advocating for bloodshed, yet apparently did not take part in the deadly rioting. Instead, she landed at Princeton and Harvard. The sad truth is that most Americans have no interest in understanding what really happened that week, beyond reinforcing our ideological biases. We accept propagandistic claims of "organized massacre" when "chaotic, deadly riot" is far more accurate. There are pictures of charred government soldier corpses, burned alive in their vehicles. That simply does not happen in a one-sided massacre. Meanwhile, there is a suspicious lack of any photographic evidence of organized executions and other characteristics of a massacre. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Ling#Documentary_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Ling#Documentary_controve...
analog31 5y ago
>>> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics. The free world developed the vaccine, and virtually the entire R&D and manufacturing infrastructure that made vaccine development possible. Also, response to the pandemic has been highly regional, suggesting that we don't have a single unifying "ethical system." There are also two polarized camps related to the presentation of information to the public, such as the effects of carbon dioxide, the results of elections, and so forth. I wonder if there's a better example than the pandemic for supporting your hypothesis.
clavicat 5y ago
This is some asinine cultural analysis, as if entire cultures can be reduced to the embrace of moral philosophies. You could just have easily described China as harboring a deontological commitment to social harmony and deference to authority, or America as being consequentialist in its embrace of freedom as the approach most conducive to happiness and opposed to tyranny. Both are caricatures, of course. A problem I’ve noticed with philosophy nerds is that they have a tendency to overemphasize the importance of their niche interest by hallucinating the influence of philosophical reasoning in human affairs and historical events. Most people in most times don’t think about this stuff at all. It’s completely irrelevant.
- Bayesian_bro 5y ago
  This logic works on the average. There are plenty of nuances between the two countries. This is my reduced experience from spending lots of time in China from the early 2000's.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  Indeed, all of philosophy has devolved from praxis to theory unmooring itself from the seed by which it began: that of living informed by wisdom. It is damning that one of its elevated patrons is a man who wrote in spirals. The philosophers of thousands of years ago instructed by which they lived: drinking to excess in bathtubs if you were a hedonist or meditating in the woods surviving only on the food which others gave you if you were a Buddhist.
naruvimama 5y ago
One reason could be that Americans are traumatised by the total control by the church for almost 2 millennia, save for the last century perhaps. Even today every President takes oath at a church because without the Shepard's blessings it would be impossible to get the sheep's votes. As much as I dislike the CCP, I would like to see Americans ask their churches to come clean on their past and present activities. And there is some true separation between the church and state.
nyokodo 5y ago
> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics We’ll see. Due to it’s Zero COVID strategy and ineffectual vaccines China has a highly immunonaive population just as the virus gets so infectious that other Zero COVID countries have abandoned that strategy. However, New Zealand, Singapore etc have the much better mRNA vaccines. I hope the terrible cost of losing their basic human rights was worth it for them, but I suspect the worst days of COVID are ahead for China.
montblanc 5y ago
Not everything is measured by economic success. Liberal democracy is a value in of itself not just for financial gain. Could be that the Chinese system is better economically, who knows. But to me it sounds very alien to live there - I wouldn't want to. They don't align with most of my values. Now, present America which is fast becoming eaten by radicals may also become not aligned with my values at some point (at that point Europe will be the last standing), but for now it's better for people who appreciate liberal democracy.
- kiba 5y ago
  It's hard to know if the information we get out of China is reasonably accurate, for a given value of 'reasonably accurate'. It seems that the Chinese has problem with rampant cheating by both authorities and corporations, leading to many projects that seems impressive at first but are of questionable quality.
  - montblanc 5y ago
    For sure. The lack of transparency is a given in an authoritarian regime and I'm sure there are consequences. Isn't Covid a good example? Chinese scientists who tried to ring the alarm where harassed or worse when the whole outbreak was beginning. Kinda reminds me of what happened in Chernobyl.
    - marderfarker2 5y ago
      You also have to be aware of the language barrier/lack of voices from within China who can give you context of what is happening. News that you hear about China are mostly written by western media who has little to no clue about what actually happened (remember the Bloomberg report on the spy chip?). I would exercise caution when reading anything online, especially at this very low SNR climate. Key to peace and tolerance is understanding, unfortunately China is like a blackbox to most, and people tend to get angry at things they don’t understand.
      - montblanc 5y ago
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Aunche 5y ago
I think that deontological vs consequentialist ethics is a spectrum. If Covid were as painful and dangerous as Ebola, people would be much more likely to accept stricter quarantines and mandates. I think the problem with Western deontology is that it is no longer rooted in consequences and has become a parody of itself. Take US foreign affairs, for example. We used to care about limiting the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The most efficient way to do so was to support anti-communist dictators that could be bought out. However, this was sold to the people as "spreading democracy". A generation later, those in power genuinely believed that America is supposed to spread democracy, which is why we spent trillions of dollars trying to do so in the Middle East to little effect.
petre 5y ago
Different ethics? You are very open minded. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Totalitarian governments busy themselves with editing history and skewing the narrative. I've been there, growing in a communist country liberated because the USSR went bankrupt. So, thank you USA. Now we can hold views critical of the government without being arrested, tortured and sent to forced labour camps.
wavefunction 5y ago
As you've described yourself, you're more of a shallow cliche of Americans and one that doesn't reflect well on the rest of us. You're as real an American as I am, and no more.
wavefunction 5y ago
As you've described yourself, you're more of a shallow cliche of Americans and one that doesn't necessarily reflect well on the rest of us. You're as real an American as the rest of us, and no more.
jacobsenscott 5y ago
Wow. not "forgetting about slavery" is tearing the country apart? You are so far down the racist q-anon rabbit hole, I doubt you can see your way out. The US is today, and always has been deeply racist. That didn't end when slavery ended. The main forces tearing this country apart today are white nationalists who were so freaked out that cops started being held accountable for modern day lynchings that they are trying to overthrow the government.
- Bayesian_bro 5y ago
  I definitely voted for Biden.
gtsop 5y ago
MURICA FREEDUM = everyone in the whole universe is free to do as they wish. as long as it is not in conflict with the interests of the american economic elites.
- Bhilai 5y ago
  and the Church or Christian beliefs.
throwawaygal7 5y ago
There's a lot Id like to discuss about the logic in this comment, but one thing really struck me 'the Chinese know tienamen square was a bad thing'... I have a number of Chinese friends from college and they universally view this event as a CIA fraud with no actual basis in historical reality. I really would like to know what your basing your logic here on.
smt88 5y ago
I would qualify your comment about "prosperity and success" to say that the CCP (which is not the same as "China") cares about average prosperity and the further entrenchment of the ruling elite. Chinese people are too numerous, varied, and under-studied (since no honest political surveys are done there) for me to comment on their overall culture.
beervirus 5y ago
> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics Can we? I have no idea how many people in China have died from covid, and neither do you. All we have to go on is what the state-run media says.
netcan 5y ago
Different but also not always so different. American alarmism over communism has, at times, led them down a similar pathway.
pyuser583 5y ago
A lot of Chinas current decision making doesn’t seem too consequentialist. Cracking down on tech companies? Is that supposed to make China a stronger country? China wants to be a “great power,” but that’s more deontological than consequentialist. For example, is China’s current naval expansion creating good consequences? An increased GDP? Higher life expectancy? Higher literacy rates? Not really. How about the Belt and Road project? Is it increasing GDP?

peatmoss 5y ago

We have to also consider the ethical framing of “success.” Perhaps success is ripping the country apart rather than forgetting the moral blight of slavery. Truthfully, I don’t have a good answer here myself beyond, “uh, something in between willful forgetting and never ending cross-group animus.”

colinmhayes 5y ago

Completely disagree with your portrayal of consequentialism. Freedom absolutely provides utility, and allowing the government to disappear people who disagree with it is in no way a path to maximizing utility.

Bayesian_bro 5y ago
The American government "disappears" many people by locking them up in the criminal justice system. It's just for slightly different reasons.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Slightly different? Who is in prison for something "slightly different" than publicly accusing a government official of rape?
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  You understand that when you disappear someone, it means that you have no idea what happened to them.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    Now that this is moving the goal posts. Lots of people go missing and die for unknown reasons, including non-violent ones. The issue with "disappearing" is that it is done by coordinated groups (including the prison-industrial complex). It is not that we don't know precisely how the victims got hurt.
- dionidium 5y ago
  This comparison is risible. First of all, you actually do have to commit a crime to go to prison, in the vast majority of cases. Second, the details of your trial (and appeal) are public. The "mass incarceration" meme has been too successful for it's own good, so successful that people seem earnestly to believe that most prisoners are innocent or there for spurious reasons, but it's simply not the case. The median state prisoner in the U.S. is a violent offender with a long rap sheet.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >The median state prisoner in the U.S. is a violent offender with a long rap sheet. source?
    - dionidium 5y ago
      As the chart here shows, violent offenders are the largest category of prisoners: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html This chart reveals a lot of problems with our system. Are too many people in jail for drugs? Sure, probably. (But it's nowhere near the largest category.) Do we have a big problem with getting people in local jails to speedy trials? Yes, absolutely. Are our sentences too long? Yes, in some cases. But most people in prison committed a serious crime. I don't have the data on the "long rap sheet" portion of my claim, though I would encourage you to look out for it every time there's a news story about a high-profile arrest. The list of previous crimes in most cases would be comical if it weren't so tragic. Additionally, studies of released inmates show very high recidivism rates. One study showed that, "401,288 state prisoners released in 2005 had 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period, an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner". Source: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisoner-recidivism-9-year-follow-period-2005-2014 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...
merpnderp 5y ago
I don't think you're down in the weeds enough. China does have freedom to a degree. Obviously there's lots of ways where they have zero freedom also. But it certainly looks like the CCP is attempting to maximize freedom where it provides utility and minimize it where it hurts their goals or prosperity. I vehemently disagree with that stance, but I do want acknowledge the CCP's actual stance.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Disappearing people who accuse the government/government officials of wrongdoing will never maximize utility.
  - marderfarker2 5y ago
    I think you will disappear if you offend anyone too powerful, even in first worlds/democratic countries.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    I think that is a weak argument and difficult or impossible to prove. The better argument is against utilitarianism itself. Humans deserve some rights even if it means less utility.

asib 5y ago

Are you genuinely comparing Tianamen Square to centuries of slavery?

Bayesian_bro 5y ago
The Chinese also don't talk about a lot of the bad things that happened in the great leap forward, which could have a case made that it was worse than slavery.
- yardie 5y ago
  Is like to see what that case is? Because nothing about the Great Leap I’ve read compares to chattel slavery or the 40% losses of life in the transatlantic slave trade.
  - cloverich 5y ago
    Go read stories about neighbors eating each others children to survive. It is pointless to compare tragedies as to which is worse, but it is worthwhile to recognize the magnitude of the (unimaginable) suffering caused by bad policy. The point is you wouldn't want to experience either -- neither is a better choice, they were both disasters worthy of keeping in memory.
  - fmajid 5y ago
    In absolute number of dead, it's certainly worse, if only because of the scale of China. According to Henry Louis Gates 12.7 million Africans were abducted by the slave trade. Estimates for the Great Leap Forward are 15 to 55M dead from famine and several million more from violence. https://www.abhmuseum.org/how-many-africans-were-really-taken-to-the-u-s-during-the-slave-trade/ https://www.abhmuseum.org/how-many-africans-were-really-take...
  - nescioquid 5y ago
    The Great Leap famine that killed between 11.6 - 55 million over fours years, compared to the Atlantic slave trade with estimated deaths from 2 - 60 million (over 200 hundred years).[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic...

slothtrop 5y ago

Ostensibly consequentialist, but that is just a symptom of maintaining authority and order. Arguably many choices from the Chinese State reported in the last decade have been at the expense of prosperity and success, such as Xi consolidating power and cracking down on business leaders. Hyper centralization of power rarely works out well, and when it has, those personalities as in SK and Singapore favored Capitalism.

jvanderbot 5y ago

I liked your take on this situation and the tradeoffs, but please note I'm a red blooded American that just ordered a tesla, doesn't own guns, and couldn't tell you who won the Super Bowl last year.

DFHippie 5y ago
Yeah, I'd push back a bit on the "red blooded American" = "rural truck driver/gun owner" idea, at least if "red blooded American" is supposed to mean "typical American" or "indisputably American" or "American who wishes their country to flourish".
thakoppno 5y ago
> who won the Super Bowl last year Tom Brady is usually a good guess.
Bayesian_bro 5y ago
My backstory is that I used to live in SF for 10 years before this pandemic. We moved to a rural western area because of the pandemic. I need the diesel truck to tow trailers.
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  You went from https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Promethea https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Promethea To https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Pandora https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Pandora

sschueller 5y ago

I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it? The time I spend in the US I had the feeling that you have more of a pseudo freedom than actual freedom. Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested. You go to a town festival and the people who want to drink are enclosed in a small area like cattle.

nsxwolf 5y ago
You can talk about the Tulsa race massacre. You can make TV shows depicting it. Forces may have conspired to keep it from the forefront of the American consciousness, but nobody was going around burning the books or throwing people in jail for bringing it up.
dev_tty01 5y ago
In the US (and most western countries), I can put up a website detailing what happened in the Tulsa race massacre with no fear of government censorship or retaliation. In China, I could not do the same with details of Tiananmen Square.
zepto 5y ago
The Tulsa race massacre which has been featured in pop culture and all over the press in the last few years because a lot of Americans didn’t know about it. Vs The Tiananmen Square massacre which is censored to even mention digitally in China, and state agents intimidate citizens outside China just for mentioning it. Also note that Tulsa was 100 years ago. Around the time of the birth of the CCP, which has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since that time. Tiananmen was in 1989. Any attempt to equivocate these two is utterly intellectually dishonest.
- vmception 5y ago
  Okay so a more apt comparison would be 30 years after the Tulsa race massacre in America to see if was easier to talk about it Or 100 years after the Tianamen Square massacre in China to see if its easier to talk about it then great. very productive.

achenatx 5y ago

letting the government have total control over your life works great until someone gets in charge that does bad things. Then you get 60-80 million killed by their own government in the great leap forward.

ecopoesis 5y ago

Whitewashing history to save the economy is certainly an interesting take. Let's be clear: the reason the Chinese government wants to forget and move on from Tiananmen Square is because it threatens their power. The scariest thing for an autocrat is the people realizing that people hold the real power, and that all systems of government only exist because of the consent of the governed (implied in China's case, explicit in a democracies).

diordiderot 5y ago
Why does the right want to forget and move on from Tulsa massacre?
- z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
  Why does the left want to ignore and move on from their broad racist history? What does your comment have to do when the above comment you replied to? Partisan tribalism does nothing but project your insecurities.
carabiner 5y ago
Yet the freedom of speech in the US hasn't prevented a gerontocracy of multimillionaires (both in government and outside of it) to preside over a servant class. We have mass incarceration in for-profit prisons whose inhabitants protect California mansions from wildfires, "gig economy workers" without health insurance, and laborers who are effectively indentured servants who cannot leave their jobs without losing health care. In every city on the west coast, the tent cities grow larger by the day. "At least we can talk about it..." Yes, talk, and talk, and talk. This has come about over decades. How many decades of "freedom" will it take to actually bring change? Could it be that endless debate on Twitter is our modern bread and circuses that will amount to nothing?

ashtonkem 5y ago

I think this is overly reductive, even if it’s largely pointed in the right direction. For example, I think the best way to interpret the pandemic isn’t through ethical systems, it’s through state capacity and competence. America didn’t fumble the pandemic because of deontological ethics, it fumbled because the federal government was just straight up incompetent. Without the federal government coordinating the crisis, every state was left to try its own strategy, which really does not work during a pandemic. Furthermore china might have eventually taken a “utilitarian” approach, but only after their first strategy of denial and repression failed. Like many authoritarian regimes China’s first interest is in their own stability, not prosperity per se. In cases where the prosperity of the citizens and the pride of the party are in conflict, China will clearly favor the latter over the former.

xwolfi 5y ago

I'm a French immigrant in China. I think you're building a fake dichotomy: as a politician in France once said, borders are the only hope we have to escape if we dont like what we have. It's fine to have many models and important we can move in between them. I agree China cares about the result now but it's probably temporary: once the middle class is proportionally more important, priorities will shift, they already have somewhat. Xi Jinping announcing in glorious pomp a new stock exchange in Beijing is, for all the flaws of the communists, sort of different from what Mao would have done. Tiananmen is not something the Chinese want to forget, but that the communists want to hide, it's a bit different. But, since there's always balance in everything, rather than throw themselves wave after wave on their bullets, they make the most of what they can get now and bide their time. If that can give you some sense of relief, I never met a pro communist Chinese, never one, who would defend the party: they only ever say stuff like "bah, we had an emperor before, it's the same with another name", hardly a support of the ideology you'll agree lol. In America your Tiananmen are the civilian deaths and war crimes in Afghanistan, and see, you forgot about them and prefered to talk about someth you reformed already, like a Chinese would say of nobility and servitude under the empire. Face your demons, if you dare :)

brodouevencode 5y ago
Summing up this response as > you accuse people of this while you do that Assuming this is right (and even if it's not), do not confuse the values and actions of a government with the values of its people. The CCP has gone out of its way to remove Tiananmen from history. Many bureaucrats in the US government wish they had the power to erase points in history as what the CCP wields.

tshaddox 5y ago

A very similar thing happens with “democracy.” In America it’s basically just anything that calls itself democracy and vaguely follows some notion of Western democracy is just accepted as the obvious best way to organize society. You’ll get a lot of head scratching if you ask questions like “What if it turns out that the correlation between government policies and the policy preferences of the population is stronger in some supposedly ‘undemocratic’ countries than in major Western democracies?” After the head-scratching you’ll usually get some kind of argument that strips the former population of agency, like “oh well they’re just brainwashed.” Kinda ironic for supposed proponents of democracy to strip people of their agency.

Nevermark 5y ago
If by 'undemocratic' you mean autocratic, it isn't proponents of democracy that are stripping them of agency. It is their form of government. However, understanding the pro's and con's of any type of government, including autocracies, is a worthy pursuit. We can learn something from anyone.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > If by 'undemocratic' you mean autocratic, it isn't proponents of democracy that are stripping them of agency. It is their form of government. But you would need to show that they are actually being stripped of their agency. You can't just say "I declare that their government doesn't represent their preferences, and when they say that the government actually does represent their preferences, that's because they can't think for themselves." Having different preferences than you is not sufficient evidence of brainwashing. That's pretty circular, and you could just as easily say "Western democracy is bad, and anyone who lives in a Western democracy who says they like it is just brainwashed."
  - Nevermark 5y ago
    If a government severely punishes debate about its behavior or views it wants accepted and unchallenged, or has a system in place to eliminate information in the public sphere that it does not want you to encounter, through technology and overwhelming pressure on organizations and individuals, ... ... that's all you need to know. That is a situation designed precisely to stay in power despite not responding to a freely informed public's preferences. If an autocratic leader actually asked its citizens for their preferences on whether the autocrat should stay in power, and abided by the result - it would not be an autocracy.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

[dead]

citizenkeen 5y ago

Why would you describe black smoke diesel as American?

thinkcontext 5y ago
I believe they are referring to "rolling coal". Its the practice of modifying a diesel truck to run dirty for the purposes of directing the black cloud at someone.
cloverich 5y ago
They are contrasting their viewpoint by identifying some of their other traits in terms of "hard right" characterizations in a somewhat poetic manner, e.g. those that would stereotypically come from someone who would blanket condemn Chinese policy based purely on it not being America + Freedom. i.e. "If even _I_, as someone typically far away from X, think Y, then...". It would be like saying "I own five Tesla's but am a bit skeptical of this whole electric car thing because...""

bagacrap 5y ago

Americans obviously don't love freedom above all, at least not uniformly across the country. Many seem to be surprisingly willing to give it up in return for a sense of safety.

mmaunder 5y ago

Chinas pandemic outcome remains to be seen. Their zero Covid approach may prove increasingly challenging as new variants become more contagious and the rest of the world takes a maintenance approach. I think a centrally controlled society’s IQ is the sum if it’s leaders. A free society’s IQ is the sum of its people. That makes me optimistic about the prospects for the US.

323 5y ago
What is the bandwidth of political leaders in US occupied by? If you can have an abortion or not, who can vote and in what conditions, if vaccines are a good thing or a bad thing. Basically issues which were settled 100 years ago in other places. Meanwhile China built thousands of miles of high-speed train in the last 10 years (while US built basically none), is about to have more navy ships than the US and so on. https://twitter.com/SpiritofHo/status/1470145473315016704 https://twitter.com/SpiritofHo/status/1470145473315016704
- chernevik 5y ago
  The US leaves far more to people outside the government. We get stuff like Space X. China has profited greatly by allowing its people more economic autonomy, but even the most successful are subject to State control of whatever the State wants to control, whenever the State wants to control it. See Jack Ma.
smt88 5y ago
We will never know China's pandemic outcome because the data their govt releases is not trustworthy. Perhaps you meant only their economic outcome?

Cupertino95014 5y ago

Look at you, getting all fancy with your "deontological" and "consequentialist." Does it feel erudite to use 5 dollar words when a 10 cent word like "freedom" would do? No, actually we cannot see that "having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics." But then, we don't have police welding people's doors shut, either.

Bayesian_bro 5y ago
I think you need to look up what "deontological" means. It's putting a means before an end. America does this with spreading freedom. Colonial Spain did this with spreading christianity. Russia did this with spreading communism.
- Cupertino95014 5y ago
  I know how to look up words, thanks. You do need to de-obfuscate, though.

nickysielicki 5y ago

Historically categorizing America like this might have made sense but ever since 9/11 it’s been less and less true. How else do you explain the economic response around the 2008 recession, the patriot act and everything in the Snowden leaks, our insane wars that are ostensibly not about oil futures, or the insane amount of money printing and spending in the wake of covid? I’m not even sure I’d be willing to buy the argument that China is more consequentialist than we are. I don’t think that Tiananmen Square is their slavery. When I was in high school we had a guy visit from China and I dragged him to the school library and showed him the Wikipedia page for Tiananmen Square. He’d never heard of it. Same experience when I discussed it with Chinese friends in college. It’s not because Chinese society wants to get over it — China does not have such a thing as public opinion. Don’t look at China with rose colored glasses in the context of their 2021 economy, you have to remember how backwards and broke they were just 20 years ago. It was a totalitarian regime and it’s still a totalitarian regime, just a more wealthy one. In summary, I agree that it seems like “consequentialism” has won, but it’s not the case that the two are battling it out to see which is better. Both countries independently chose consequentialism, and maybe it didn’t have to be that way.

pphysch 5y ago

To be crystal clear, the PRC does not view Tiananmen Square as a purely domestic affair. The extent to which students were radicalized, or signal-boosted by foreign influence is unclear. In that sense, a better comparison would be an event in America's history that had significant foreign interference. For example, 9/11. You can talk objectively about 9/11, sure, just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China. However, you absolutely cannot publicly glorify 9/11 and side with al-Qaeda. That will put you on watch lists and be socially shunned to the point of never getting hired by any company that can view your online comments.

mrtranscendence 5y ago
I'm not sure what to make of this comparison. You're not sure the extent to which foreign influence played a role in radicalizing people leading up to an event where Chinese citizens were massacred by the Chinese state, so it's fair to compare it to a situation where foreign nationals murdered US civilians? This is apples and oranges. Apples and Teslas. Dogs and supercomputers. They're not the same thing. > just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China Citation needed. Even researching Tiananmen Square in China gets you on watchlists.
- pphysch 5y ago
  There is substantial evidence that Washington was involved in amplifying misinformation and possibly directing student leaders to escalate the violence. Take student leader Chai Ling, for example [1]. She is on record advocating for bloodshed, yet apparently did not take part in the deadly rioting. Instead, she landed at Princeton and Harvard. The sad truth is that most Americans have no interest in understanding what really happened that week, beyond reinforcing our ideological biases. We accept propagandistic claims of "organized massacre" when "chaotic, deadly riot" is far more accurate. There are pictures of charred government soldier corpses, burned alive in their vehicles. That simply does not happen in a one-sided massacre. Meanwhile, there is a suspicious lack of any photographic evidence of organized executions and other characteristics of a massacre. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Ling#Documentary_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Ling#Documentary_controve...

analog31 5y ago

>>> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics. The free world developed the vaccine, and virtually the entire R&D and manufacturing infrastructure that made vaccine development possible. Also, response to the pandemic has been highly regional, suggesting that we don't have a single unifying "ethical system." There are also two polarized camps related to the presentation of information to the public, such as the effects of carbon dioxide, the results of elections, and so forth. I wonder if there's a better example than the pandemic for supporting your hypothesis.

clavicat 5y ago

This is some asinine cultural analysis, as if entire cultures can be reduced to the embrace of moral philosophies. You could just have easily described China as harboring a deontological commitment to social harmony and deference to authority, or America as being consequentialist in its embrace of freedom as the approach most conducive to happiness and opposed to tyranny. Both are caricatures, of course. A problem I’ve noticed with philosophy nerds is that they have a tendency to overemphasize the importance of their niche interest by hallucinating the influence of philosophical reasoning in human affairs and historical events. Most people in most times don’t think about this stuff at all. It’s completely irrelevant.

Bayesian_bro 5y ago
This logic works on the average. There are plenty of nuances between the two countries. This is my reduced experience from spending lots of time in China from the early 2000's.
emptysongglass 5y ago
Indeed, all of philosophy has devolved from praxis to theory unmooring itself from the seed by which it began: that of living informed by wisdom. It is damning that one of its elevated patrons is a man who wrote in spirals. The philosophers of thousands of years ago instructed by which they lived: drinking to excess in bathtubs if you were a hedonist or meditating in the woods surviving only on the food which others gave you if you were a Buddhist.

naruvimama 5y ago

One reason could be that Americans are traumatised by the total control by the church for almost 2 millennia, save for the last century perhaps. Even today every President takes oath at a church because without the Shepard's blessings it would be impossible to get the sheep's votes. As much as I dislike the CCP, I would like to see Americans ask their churches to come clean on their past and present activities. And there is some true separation between the church and state.

nyokodo 5y ago

> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics We’ll see. Due to it’s Zero COVID strategy and ineffectual vaccines China has a highly immunonaive population just as the virus gets so infectious that other Zero COVID countries have abandoned that strategy. However, New Zealand, Singapore etc have the much better mRNA vaccines. I hope the terrible cost of losing their basic human rights was worth it for them, but I suspect the worst days of COVID are ahead for China.

montblanc 5y ago

Not everything is measured by economic success. Liberal democracy is a value in of itself not just for financial gain. Could be that the Chinese system is better economically, who knows. But to me it sounds very alien to live there - I wouldn't want to. They don't align with most of my values. Now, present America which is fast becoming eaten by radicals may also become not aligned with my values at some point (at that point Europe will be the last standing), but for now it's better for people who appreciate liberal democracy.

kiba 5y ago
It's hard to know if the information we get out of China is reasonably accurate, for a given value of 'reasonably accurate'. It seems that the Chinese has problem with rampant cheating by both authorities and corporations, leading to many projects that seems impressive at first but are of questionable quality.
- montblanc 5y ago
  For sure. The lack of transparency is a given in an authoritarian regime and I'm sure there are consequences. Isn't Covid a good example? Chinese scientists who tried to ring the alarm where harassed or worse when the whole outbreak was beginning. Kinda reminds me of what happened in Chernobyl.
  - marderfarker2 5y ago
    You also have to be aware of the language barrier/lack of voices from within China who can give you context of what is happening. News that you hear about China are mostly written by western media who has little to no clue about what actually happened (remember the Bloomberg report on the spy chip?). I would exercise caution when reading anything online, especially at this very low SNR climate. Key to peace and tolerance is understanding, unfortunately China is like a blackbox to most, and people tend to get angry at things they don’t understand.
    - montblanc 5y ago

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Aunche 5y ago

I think that deontological vs consequentialist ethics is a spectrum. If Covid were as painful and dangerous as Ebola, people would be much more likely to accept stricter quarantines and mandates. I think the problem with Western deontology is that it is no longer rooted in consequences and has become a parody of itself. Take US foreign affairs, for example. We used to care about limiting the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The most efficient way to do so was to support anti-communist dictators that could be bought out. However, this was sold to the people as "spreading democracy". A generation later, those in power genuinely believed that America is supposed to spread democracy, which is why we spent trillions of dollars trying to do so in the Middle East to little effect.

petre 5y ago

Different ethics? You are very open minded. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Totalitarian governments busy themselves with editing history and skewing the narrative. I've been there, growing in a communist country liberated because the USSR went bankrupt. So, thank you USA. Now we can hold views critical of the government without being arrested, tortured and sent to forced labour camps.

wavefunction 5y ago

As you've described yourself, you're more of a shallow cliche of Americans and one that doesn't reflect well on the rest of us. You're as real an American as I am, and no more.

wavefunction 5y ago

As you've described yourself, you're more of a shallow cliche of Americans and one that doesn't necessarily reflect well on the rest of us. You're as real an American as the rest of us, and no more.

jacobsenscott 5y ago

Wow. not "forgetting about slavery" is tearing the country apart? You are so far down the racist q-anon rabbit hole, I doubt you can see your way out. The US is today, and always has been deeply racist. That didn't end when slavery ended. The main forces tearing this country apart today are white nationalists who were so freaked out that cops started being held accountable for modern day lynchings that they are trying to overthrow the government.

Bayesian_bro 5y ago
I definitely voted for Biden.

gtsop 5y ago

MURICA FREEDUM = everyone in the whole universe is free to do as they wish. as long as it is not in conflict with the interests of the american economic elites.

Bhilai 5y ago
and the Church or Christian beliefs.

throwawaygal7 5y ago

There's a lot Id like to discuss about the logic in this comment, but one thing really struck me 'the Chinese know tienamen square was a bad thing'... I have a number of Chinese friends from college and they universally view this event as a CIA fraud with no actual basis in historical reality. I really would like to know what your basing your logic here on.

smt88 5y ago

I would qualify your comment about "prosperity and success" to say that the CCP (which is not the same as "China") cares about average prosperity and the further entrenchment of the ruling elite. Chinese people are too numerous, varied, and under-studied (since no honest political surveys are done there) for me to comment on their overall culture.

beervirus 5y ago

> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics Can we? I have no idea how many people in China have died from covid, and neither do you. All we have to go on is what the state-run media says.

netcan 5y ago

Different but also not always so different. American alarmism over communism has, at times, led them down a similar pathway.

pyuser583 5y ago

A lot of Chinas current decision making doesn’t seem too consequentialist. Cracking down on tech companies? Is that supposed to make China a stronger country? China wants to be a “great power,” but that’s more deontological than consequentialist. For example, is China’s current naval expansion creating good consequences? An increased GDP? Higher life expectancy? Higher literacy rates? Not really. How about the Belt and Road project? Is it increasing GDP?