Don't forget the part where they all have access to running water and penicillin now. They're responsible for the greatest humanitarian success story in world history over the last 40 years.
Overlay that with how the US spent our cold war dividend over the same period..
Every big country has got some skeletons attached to it, especially including the US.
If you're primed to see the foreign country as monstrous and evil, you'll see it that way, whatever the balance of the facts for people who live there may be.
For example, social credit. Do you know what it is? Do you know specifically what's being proposed and implemented right now? Or are you going off of some breathless reporting?
(super briefly, there's no consumer credit system in China. Currently there are 2 corporate credit systems evolving in response to need (alipay, wepay), and something like 15 different government-sponsored pilot programs testing different ideas in different provinces, because having consumer credit scores is in fact important for finance. This gets reported as some Big Brother Social Credit Program With A Big Dystopian Plan by western media).
What I like on HN is that, unlike some other communities I've observed, you can still gain votes when reasonably arguing on either side of the issue. The hive mind isn't as strong yet to defy all reason.
Eh. I commented that "Chinese people are people too" the other day and got pretty heavily downvoted.
Are those downvoters expressing a reasoned belief that Chinese people aren't people? Or are they just reduced to a set of tribal motor reflexes with up and down arrows?
I'm actually kinda hoping it's the 2nd one rather than the first.
Oh come on now - don't pretend that comment was some neutral statement of fact. It was a clear implication of moral failure in your opponent's argument. And it's not really persuasive to then double down on a false dilemma (is my out-group evil, or just stupid?).
I said "can", not "you always do". That said, context matters, and in the wrong context, a terse factual statement will be taken by almost everyone at anything but face value.
Without LBJ, we wouldn't have had the Space Program, the various civil rights bills of the 60s, or Medicare. He also escalated Vietnam from a minor conflict to a major disaster.
Most impactful President since FDR, easily, yet he doesn't get half the press of Reagan or Nixon.
Not really. Despots usually have politics to deal with. Not everything is possible.
The companies in question had a massive technological and force advantage over the local populace with free reign when it came to managing dissent with force. Their only political concerns were back in Europe.
The nazi regime is very much comparable to the Chinese communist party in methods and death toll, about the only thing they don't measure up on is overt military aggression.
Why do you dismiss any comparisons with the Nazis out of hand? Seems like an exceptionally poor way to learn from history.
Because they're generally silly hyperbole, just like this example. If you put China in the same tier as Nazi Germany, you're missing the forest for the trees.
Yeah, but US-backed != US-hatched. The proximal cause is that Bolivia had fallen into a state of utter chaos (therefore a power vacuum); the proximal cause of that is that the president tried to pull off a Xi Jingping but this didn't play even with much of the population that initially backed him.
It's the difference between setting a house on fire to acquire the land, and buying a land lot where a house used to be.
"Rule of law" doesn't mean picking and choosing whom it applies to. Saddam was our best buddy when he was using mustard gas in Khuzestan against the right people.
International politics is rule by power rather than rule of law. The person you're replying to got it right.
You saw it take hold in 2016. Obama got the populist votes, and then Trump did. People wonder how the same people could vote for both, the common thread is populism.
Overlay that with how the US spent our cold war dividend over the same period..