One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad. Jimmy Lai should not have been allowed to this quietly.
> One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad.
"City-upon-a-hill" is marketing and has never been grounded in fact. It’s hubris and arrogance. The US is viewed as that place if you get on the wrong side of, it will bomb you or replace your government through coercion. It outspends every country on "defense" to ensure this.
History is littered with plenty of examples where the US favored a more authoritarian or "evil" government over less, sometimes even installing them. Arab Spring is a recent example where you saw governments replaced with the US' help, while leaving some notable monarchies alone.
In reality, the US employs its foreign policy for its own interests. It’s always been like that.
The Arab Spring is a bad example if you're trying to say that the US is installing governments... South America's history provides far better examples.
That said, the US doesn't need to be perfect to still be an example of providing freedom for its own citizens.
for its own citizens that were fortunate enough to be born at the right place at the right time. how should the rest of the world feel about the US if they get all the freedoms, comforts and opportunities and the rest of the world doesn’t?
Is that a country to be admired by all others or resented.
There’s a lot of examples, yes in South America too, but the US helped replace or tried to help replace some governments during the Arab Spring. Libya being the biggest example, where the US and its allies imposed a no fly zone to help topple a dictator it didn’t like [0]. It could have done that in other places, but you didn’t hear a peep from the US when those protests were crushed by their governments during the Arab Spring.
Libya is a super super bad example if you're looking for bad US behavior. This is literally the very first sentence of your own source:
> On 19 March 2011, a NATO-led coalition began a military intervention into the ongoing Libyan Civil War to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSCR 1973).
Compared to the South America stuff, this is saintly and angelic behavior helping out the world in every way. It's not the US alone, it's a coalition that expands beyond NATO, there's a UN resolution...
In fact bringing this up as a "bad behavior" example proves just how much of a shining city on a hill the US has been around the world. It's been bad, but it's also done lots of good stuff.
I don't think you're understanding what OP actually said. They didn't cite the Libya example as an example of bad behaviour; there wasn't any value statement on it at all. They were saying the fact that they intervened in Libya but not elsewhere was an example of the US intervening when it suits them.
I'm not an expert in US foreign policy so I'll refrain from entering the debate itself, I just think you're not arguing against what the OP is actually saying.
Quite the opposite. Actually states don't have interests - interest groups do - and those of them who are friends with the state get to install theirs as the state's.
> states don't have interests - interest groups do
People have interests. To promote those interests, they organise. Sometimes as interest groups within states. Sometimes as business corporations. Sometimes as states.
US probably never was
"the good guy" and just acted on its own interests, but that's not the point. People believed that it's true. Or probably just internalized that as a part of a "country stereotype", like how Germans are hard-working and brits are polite. So it was OK and sometimes even expected for the US to scold the evildoers.
Now that changed, at least in my social circle, and US being moralistic is seen as hypocrisy.
Someone can be and asshole and still be right. It will be harder to convince other people to go along with you if you are an asshole, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't call out wrongdoing when you see it.
Which is a fair charge of ethical character, but not of truth. What makes whataboutism a fallacious rhetorical move is not that it fails to identify someone's ethical shortcomings, but that it tries to substitute them for subject matter.
The logic of whataboutism is fascinating, because as long as someone is deemed a bad enough actor, their statements have the effect of dynamically rewriting reality in real time to be the opposite of whatever Bad Actor says. Which, to my mind, gives them too much power. It's simpler to just believe in objective reality, believe that language works roughly according to a correspondence theory of truth and that statements are or are not legitimate on account of their corresponding to reality, which isn't something you can determine based on character alone.
But I admit on some level this might be a misunderstanding of whataboutism, because it's holding it to a standard of intellectual consistency that it's not aspiring to.
A "whataboutism" defense only works in an argument that goes like this:
A:"You should stop doing X because X is wrong and evil and you are wrong and evil if you continue doing X!"
B:"But you beat your wife."
Where X != "beating one's wife".
Here the B's argument is: "But you do X yourself!". This is not an attack on moral character but a direct refutation of A's argument. If A really thought X is wrong and evil then A would not be doing X. And if A really considers itself wrong and evil then it should be figuring a way to stop doing X first, or, at least, concurrently with demanding that from B. Either way, A is not very persuasive.
Something less effective about ass holes doing wrong things complaining about other assholes doing wrong things, a while insisting they're not assholes. Ultimately the "damage" isn't being called out as a hypocritic asshole, it's the world realize there's nothing wrong with said wrong things. Although to some that's not damage but nature healing.
Go back a couple more years, and the UK is probably more relevant to bring up (especially considering the context), they used to have similar aspirations before they learned better.
I would like to remind you that HK was a British colony for more than 100 years, and there was no democracy or freedom then. They only allowed the first partly free elections two years before they gave it back to China, in 1995. And not because they suddenly wanted freedom and democracy for HK, but because it would be harder for China and better for their own interests. Hypocrisy all the way.
That's kind of misleading. HK had a lot of civil freedoms (rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of speech). China explicitly blocked earlier democratization. The vote only managed to get through after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown made HK panic.
> No freedoms are ever unlimited, so that's not an interesting point.
Of course no freedoms are unlimited, so I'm not sure why are you reading this literally?
> The question is, were they useful?
Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about the lack of freedom under British rule, and you ask if it was useful for HKers? While there are a lot of people in HK who are not happy about what China is doing now, there is almost no one who would take British rule over that. I actually talked with people about it in person when I was in HK.
They didn't run out of money just because they fought two wars. For some bizarre reason the UK has simply chosen to be (relatively) poor instead of embracing a growth policy. Despite all their potential advantages their GDP per capita is about equal to the poorest US state.
It's actually a fun demo, that shows a fairly common difference between Europeans and Americans. The demo is mostly about comparing GDP, while HDI or something else more "human" is left as an exercise to the reader. If someone was doubting Americans only care about money, now you have some more evidence :)
Yeah, money machine go brrrr is a great sign of "footprint", lets just ignore millenniums of inventions, technology and others things coming from Europe, before the US was even a colony. Texas GDP was $x millions last year, clearly larger footprint on the world :)
It's actually pretty fun and interesting the different bubbles we all live in, for better or worse.
This is actually the reason why I'm a proponent of the US Federal government doing far _far_ less. Things like Healthcare and other safety net things (along with most other things) should be done at the state level, and the the fact that European nations, which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things, are the proof that this would work.
I'm convinced that the federal government doing more and more things is the root cause if the increasing toxicity of American politics. The further removed a populace is from their representatives the less control they have and the worse they feel. Everything should always be done at the most local level that it is possible to do it. Some things have to be done at a relatively high level, but Americans have increasingly been jumping straight to "this is a job for the federal government" when very often state, or even city governments in some cases, would be perfectly capable.
> which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things
What do you mean that the countries are poorer? Are you just thinking about the gross salary people get per month, or is there something else in this calculation?
The fact that people get health care, parental leave, can freely move between countries, able to afford having a child, have emergency services that arrive relatively quick and all those things mean that a country is not poor, and the countries that don't have those, are "poorer", at least in my mind. When I think "poor country" I don't think about the GDP, but how well the citizens and residents are protected by ills.
I know you've made a handful of comments all to this effect throughout the thread, but it's really not helpful in this particular comment chain. Yes, we know your quality of life in Europe is great. Yes, we know life is more than just GDP. "What we mean that the countries are poorer" is obviously GDP in this comment chain, and this comment chain is not disputing your quality of life, it's pointing out that we (collectively) have the money to have that quality of life here in the US, too.
But thats a flawed metric. How much cash do you need saved to send 2 kids to university in US vs typical Europe, without burdening them for their best years of life with crushing debt? How much is left afterwards? How much after acquiring some long term illness with expensive treatment or being in bad accident? Don't think that due to being young this ain't your concern, all elders have messed up health in many ways. Retirement. And so on. These are direct costs and its all about money. Ie US couple with teens just about to go to college with say 500k are same or poorer than similar family in Europe having say 200k savings, or will be after few years. Or maybe not, depends.
I'd say its uncomparable directly, or very, very hard. You can say visit both places and walk around and see the general state of the country and its people, compare capitals. This is where money is spent (or not).
Not going into happiness, stress levels, depression/anxiety and meds consumption, obesity levels or longevity, that would be too easy I agree. Although this is also money related, more than anything else.
80% of US college grads have debt under 30k. Despite the bleak picture painted, servicing that interest at say 7% is $175 a month, or about 3.5% the average salary of a new grad.
This pales in comparison to some of the elephant in the room ways most common ways to go broke, which is to say get something like a child support judgement against you (20% pretax, like 26+% post-tax in middle income brackets) or have an alimony payment (these conveniently don't generally show up in bankruptcy statistics because they are not dischargeable). Medical debt can at least be discharged in bankruptcy.
The federal government has no constitutional authority to provide universal health care, per the 10th amendment which leaves an extremely narrow constraint of enumerated powers to the federal government and the rest left to the people and the states.
However, the feds already siphon about as much tax as the populace can bear just on accomplishing what it is allowed to do, so there is basically nothing left for the states to implement these kind of measures.
Yes, if the states were to take over many of these things, obviously federal taxes would need to dramatically decrease (luckily, the vast majority of federal spending is doing the things that I think states should do anyways, so you'd be simultaneously dramatically decreasing federal taxes and federal spending).
You couldn't just have the states take over these responsibilities and have nothing else change. My suggestion is in fact a pretty radical change in how the US federal government works. I'm not under any illusion that this is likely to happen. The ratchet of power unfortunately only goes in one direction.
Our GDP would drop several percent if we fixed our healthcare system. Part of why we look richer on paper is that we light a lot of money on fire for exactly nothing.
Ah, there’s always zero-sum competition for housing to eat up any excess that might otherwise go to savings. That’s true. Money gets freed up across the board, you spend it on housing or lose ground in the housing competition. Good ol’ red queen’s race.
The American government spends an incredible amount on healthcare already. If it were competently administered, it would already be enough money to cover universal healthcare.
Which buyer are you referring to? Consumers paying cash can negotiate as much as they want, and often secure large discounts. Commercial health plans also negotiate hard with their network providers, although some of them play unethical tricks with PBMs to artificially inflate prescription drug prices. Medicare and Medicaid don't really negotiate with providers, they just set rates by arbitrary fiat and providers can take it or leave it. Medicare does have some statutory limitations on how they can negotiate drug prices, though.
Which doctors? Some specialists do quite well but many primary care physicians earn less than software developers, especially once you account for education expenses and ongoing mandatory professional expenses. What is the correct amount for them to earn anyway?
Who is fetishizing GDP? I've never seen public policy be set based on the goal of maximizing GDP to the exclusion of all else. You're arguing against a strawman.
We already do have universal health care for the most expensive groups to insure (lower income households and the elderly), and technically have it for everyone in that hospitals aren't allowed to deny life saving care to anyone regardless of their ability to pay (which is expensive, short sighted, and quite inadequate overall).
Adding the rest of the population to the existing public insurance system would not cost much financially, but it would be a political catastrophe for whatever party implemented it if it didn't go well.
In short, I don't think anyone seriously argues the US can't afford universal health care, but the real and perceived risk of change is seen as too great politically.
It's worth pointing out this happened entirely post 2008. This is not some "decision" people took, or some long term loss of empire. The US recoevered from the 2008 crisis way better than everyone else, and nobody really understands why yet.
A country with a business friendly, low regulatory environment, coupled with a high work ethic and poor work/life balance, if nothing else, is not going to be a country that falls behind.
Americans complain a lot, and the system isn't that comfortable or respectful, but they aren't facing existential economic irrelevance.
Quite the opposite. The US quickly recovered from 2008 thanks to tech. Tech that the rest of the world wasn't able to keep up with thanks to it being a heavily regulated environment (patents, copyright, etc.).
You would be hard pressed to find anyone who claims the EU has a "Tech Friendly" environment.
Every techie with skill and an idea in the EU said "F-this, I'm going to the US to start my company" which lead to others saying "F-this, I'm going to the US for tech work". There is no one to point the finger at, because even today, this is exactly what Europeans want. They just haven't put the pieces together to link "heavy regulation and very worker/consumer friendly environment" with "Nobody wants to plant their seeds here". Instead it seems the EUs plan is to just continually fine foreign tech companies to make up for the barren infertile business lands they cultivated.
Germany is a borderline shrinking economy with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts. And this is celebrated like it's some kind of triumph. Everyday I wish I could violently shake Europeans and beg them to open their eyes. Economic strain will fracture all of Europe.
> with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts
If true (seems dubious to me), that's a ~20% difference. The difference in wages is a lot larger than that though, at least for tech workers. So that doesn't really explain why German tech can't compete against US tech.
Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.
I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.
But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.
The only hope the EU has is that Trump fucks up the US enough in the next 3 years that we aren't able to continue to attract the vast majority of the people worldwide who actually want to work and reap the rewards of their efforts.
The EU has chosen stagnation, which seems fine at first but looks worse and worse as all the people (or nations in this case) who didn't make that choice continue to grow. Unless you have a closed, close knit community like the Amish, stagnation does not end well.
Please explain how US patent and copyright law prevents "the rest of the world" (which I assume really means the EU, because China seems to be doing just fine in their own sandbox) from developing a meaningful tech sector?
They have done very well in the manufacturing sector via IP theft starting in the 1970s.
I don't see how that's relevant to much post-2008 in the tech sector, which is primarily software driven and where China has very intentionally built their own walled garden.
Decisions made in 2008 were also a huge part of this.
The UK had a framework to liquidate financial institutions that was similar to the US, and this was deployed in early 2008 with Northern Rock and B&B. The end result was a multi-billion pound profit to the government.
Gordon Brown then decided that he needed to lead the global economy (and he has written, at the last count, two books which explain in significant detail that he was a thought leader and economic visionary through this period) by bailing out banks that were large employers in his constituency. With RBS, this involved investing at a very high valuation and then shutting down all the profitable parts of the bank, the loss was £20-30bn. With HBOS, he forced the only safe bank to acquire them, this resulted in the safe bank going bankrupt a year after the financial crisis ended in the US, and another multi-billion pound loss.
The US benefitted massively from having one of the most successful financial executives of the period, Hank Paulson, running the economy rather than (essentially) a random man from Edinburgh who have never had a job in the private sector (apart from law, obv) but held a seat with a huge number of constituents working at the banks he should have been shutting down (Brown himself had never worked in the private sector at all, parachuted into a safe seat after his doctorate). Geithner nearly suffered from that same fault, but did well with TARP (again though, iirc, this was Paulson's plan).
The UK choosing to shut down most of its native financial sector is a good example. With RBS it was particularly mad because the government ended up being a massive shareholder and then they chose to shut down all the profitable parts of the business, and double-down on the worst parts. Natwest rates franchise was probably worth £5bn, they basically shut the unit down in entirety (and a lot of those people went to large hedge funds and just went back to generating hundreds in millions in revenue) meaning that the taxpayer lost tens of billions AND the economy was knee-capped for decades.
This is taken as an example to show that even when the incentives were there, the government took a decision for nakedly political reasons. In the opposite direction, they folded HBOS into Lloyds, this was done to protect Scotland (both the PM and the Chancellor had a large number of constituents who would have lost their job if these banks were shut down...they were bailed out) and the result was Lloyds needing a bailout about one year after the banking crisis ended in the US. Again, this was sold to the public as the result of "risky casino bankers on huge bonuses"...in reality, it was just poorly paid commercial bankers lending very large amounts of money to people who couldn't ever it pay back AND politicians then making terrible choices with other people's money to boost their chances in some byelection no-one remembers.
This attitude permeates almost everything the UK does. Schools, politics first. Healthcare, politics first. Electricity, politics first.
I genuinely do not understand how anyone can't look at the scale of political intervention into the economy in the UK and not understand why this might lead to lower growth than the US. In Scotland, the government is 60% of the economy, this higher than Communist states with no legal private sector, it is an incredible number. If you look at income distribution, after-tax income under £100k is as flat or flatter than Communist states too, again this is incredible.
What is surprising is that the UK's economy is growing so quickly. The supply-side in most sectors is almost completely gone, in some economically-significant sectors you have regulators effectively managing companies, very few workers have economically useful skills because of the strong incentives in place to acquire non-economic skills...and the economy is still growing faster than most of Europe. To be fair, almost all of that immigration of low-skilled labour into the UK which is going to be absolute time-bomb financially and the rapid growth in public-sector pay has also helped consumption (even more so, the UK is running a deficit of 5% of GDP with revenues growing 4%/year in an economy that is shrinking in per capita terms...obviously, this is not sustainable)...but growth is still way higher than reason would dictate.
Comparing this to the US is not serious in any way. You have a country that prioritises growth beyond reason and are comparing that with a country which is hostile to change beyond reason. There is no possible comparison. The decisions every government since 1997 has made have been intended to reduce growth, people happily voted for this, and are now upset that the economy is shit...why?
Because everything in the US is inflated thanks to rampant printing of the USD. Healthcare? Inflated. Education? Inflated. Day-to-day stuff? Inflated. Property values? Inflated.
Most of Europe has lower GDP per capita than the poorest states of the US, yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans. American growth is built on the backs of piss-poor healthcare, shoddy education and an overinflated perception of the tech sector which holds the rest of the world hostage (but not for long).
I think you are making broad generalizations, so broad that the only statement it's clear you're trying to make is "The US is bad" and the broadness of your argument weakens it greatly.
Cost inflation isn't unique to the United States.
Europe isn't a single country.
> yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans
Does this include the Romani people? Does this include the Ukranians being attacked by Russia?
Greece's housing cost burden is higher than 30 US states. Not all regions in the USA have faced serious property cost pressures. [1] [2]
"Day to day stuff" is a very broad category, and that includes items that are flat or decreasing in cost. In that sense I will point out that VAT is much higher in the EU than sales tax in most US states, with VAT rates of >20% being very common while the highest combined sales tax in the USA is just over 10%. Sales tax/VAT is a very regressive tax that harms the poor the most. For someone on the poor end of the spectrum in Europe, buying something like a computer or television is a greater burden than someone in the US.
I'm reminded of the natural gas price spikes in 2022 in Europe, and of how the EU's average electricity price is about 2-3x higher than it is in the US. The US has an extremely stable supply of basic needs like energy and food.
Education costs have been flat or lower than the rate of inflation in the US since roughly 2016, so for the last 10 years the idea that education is becoming more expensive in the USA has been squarely false. [3]
Healthcare, I'll give you that one, the US is not faring well. But we can look at some systems in Europe having their own difficulties like the UK and Spain and it's not like healthcare isn't a challenge elsewhere. I will also point out that the US does have public healthcare for the poorest (Medicaid) and for all people over 65 years old (Medicare), and Medicare is a standout in quality among public healthcare systems in some outcome categories.
> They ran out of money, 2 world wars bankrupted them.
With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home. This is a fundamental difference with the US. I don't blame the UK for focusing at home for a while to rebuild.
>
With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home.
WW2 did not 'destroy' the UK. It wasn't subjected to any of the horrors of ground warfare, and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it.
What WW2 did destroy was the UK government's ability and will to finance the sort of repression that was necessary to maintain a globe-spanning empire. Churchill in his pigheaded hubris could scream from the rooftops about India forever remaining British, but Clement wasn't going to kill people over it.
(In contrast, France lost the ability, but not the will, which is why it fought a few wars in Vietnam and Algiers, instead of letting their colonial subjects have self-rule and independence sans bloodshed.)
France's role in future global affairs easily eclipses the UK's. France still has a future as a great power, whereas the UK's opportunity is already squandered.
40,000 dead[1] and two million houses damaged in a country of 40 million people (presiding over a global empire of a billion souls) over six years is not meaningful... Especially in the context of the largest and most destructive war the world has ever known.
> Sure.. Okay.. France was worse,
Don't look at Metropolitan France, two thirds of it got to sit the war out as a puppet state.
Look further east. How many houses were 'damaged or destroyed' in Germany, Poland, the USSR..?
This isn't a suffering Olympics, but compared to war expenditures, the cost of rebuilding the damage inflicted to the Isles was a rounding error. Those expenditures (and their associated debts) were what crippled Britain's ability to maintain an empire, not the cost of rebuilding.
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[1] That sort of thing was a normal day over there. A normal one - not even a bad one.
They decided to stop being a world police, and correctly so. Now we're just waiting for US to understand the same thing, which is slowly happening, finally.
Great, so every country can just smoothly descend further into tyranny with no pushback from any other country. Thankfully we won't have any world police though!
The world police was never really there to stop tyrants, the evidence is that they'd conveniently look the other way whenever they benefitted from it, and they would even put tyrants in place when it suited them. They did stop some tyrants, for sure, but only when it was convenient.
The world saw it's greatest peace under US hegemony. It wasn't perfect and there were bloody avoidable wars on the behest of the US, but by and large things ran smoothly and US sponsored globalism brought prosperity and peace to many.
The US provided lip service to the idea, but quickly became paranoid about the threat of world wide communism and changed its tune relatively quickly. In the places where this wasn't a factor, it wasn't altruism by any stretch, but economic interests. The US saw that a post-colonial world would be fantastic for business...
Lets see what happens when the invasion of Venezuela kicks off, either the world tries to prevent yet another authoritarian government from bullying those who are already on the ground, or we'll join in on the fun I suppose, if the US feels like it wanna share the future loot.
Maybe 'World mafia' is a better description? They're not enforcing law and/or morality (nor ever have been?), they're just pressing countries for bribes for Trump, or to shift World markets for insider trades, or probably still for oil, AFAICT.
The US managed the assemble an alliance of the... let's count them:
Based on military ranking:
#5 SK, #6 UK, #7 France, #8 Japan, #9 Turkey, #10 Italy, #11 Brazil, #12 Pakistan, #14 Germany, #15 Israel, #17 Spain, #18 Australia, and if it were allowed to, #20 Ukraine.
Based on economic power: I won't even bother, only China, India, Russia aren't US allies in the top 30 or so, by GDP.
The US was a world police but it wasn't alone. Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
What the US is doing now is a tragedy that will unfold over many decades.
> Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
This breaks down as soon as you stop looking at abstract rankings and dive into the specific logistic realities of force projection. France and to a lesser extent the UK are reasonably capable, but there's no math that adds up to anything approaching America's capabilities.
Beyond that, if you do get into the specifics of force projection (and basically anything logistical to do with NATO), you see that the entire alliance was built on the assumption that the US would contribute the capabilities that kept the whole system viable.
So,
$(US) + $(ALLIES) > $(US)
However,
$(ALLIES) - $(US) < $(ALLIES)
This has been true from the beginning, and I don't think was a nefarious plot, or even mistake, for most of the alliance's history. The further we get from the Cold War alignments within which NATO was created, however, the more difficult it has become to sustain.
The problem is, this looks so much like a rerun of post WW1 America.
Tariffs (check - Smoot Hawley), American isolationism (check - America First), I guess we won't be far from the economic crisis (not checked yet - Great Depression).
At best, the US will slowly turn into Qing China. Unrivalled in its sphere of influence, stagnant and complacent. The US has always had a very strong anti-scientific undercurrent and a lot of it was kept in check by importing foreign elites wholesale (fairly sure the US public school system up to university level is nothing to write home about, on average). If the US turns against foreigners, most of the good ones will stop coming.
Now? No. But West Germany alone had 5000 main battle tanks in 1989. Demographics have changed, the economy has changed, but Europe could definitely project force all over the area about 1000-1500km in its vicinity if it really wanted to.
But Europeans definitely do not want that and up to a point, that's a good thing, yet Europe still needs a big enough force as a deterrent, and it currently does not have that.
Yes, all the European-aligned states you mention should currently be opposed to USA [or at least the fascist regime ruling it], because of the threats to Denmark/Greenland. UK, Aus should be particularly aligned against USA because of the threats to Canada (as part of the UK royalty's commonwealth).
Trusting the post-democracy, post-constitutional USA we find ourselves with is major folly. We might as well climb in bed with Russia.
This is something that people don’t realize. America is no longer world police. If Europeans want to resolve intra-European disputes like Russia-Ukraine we should stay out of it.
Instead, by refusing to sell weapons to Ukraine -- and lying about Europe's support -- when it didn't suit Trump, you've firmly placed your flag. Not allies in any meaningful sense.
The UK's having a hard enough time trying to preserve freedom in the UK.
Hold up... So you're saying that they're actually not trying to preserve freedom in the UK and have arrested hundreds of people over twitter memes?!
In all seriousness, you're approximately as free in HK as you are in the UK. In HK, don't promote democracy or insult the government in Beijing. In the UK, don't suggest that diversity isn't Our Greatest Strength.
Every society these days has an untouchable third rail. None are without beams in their own eyes.
The discussion has devolved to such a point that people from outside the UK keep parroting this (likely Kremlin originated) line that the UK is now a Muslim stronghold with no free speech when in reality it just continues to uphold the values it has influenced the world with, one of the few positives from its dark past, of protecting those unable to protect themselves. Hate speech and punching down. As if inciting violence is completely harmless and no bad ever comes of it.
Many freedom-focused people without direct experience of disability, bullying or discrimination have no way to relate to that concept, and the echo chamber amplifies the intellectually dishonest takes until they take hold. Which is exactly what the angry, seething, downtrodden richest people in the world seem to want right now. I wonder why. What a sorry, hopeless state we've allowed to happen. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, sure, but the ones who've worked hardest to develop theirs should be weighted the most. Now a Russian bot has the same value on a platform as a nuclear scientist or, dare I say it, a real journalist. Because it's entertaining and tickles some dangling dopamine receptors. I'm sure people will wind their necks in when the ultimate result has finally played out and we'll cycle back to cooler heads prevailing, but I fear we'll have to go there first before we get back.
Yes I took the bait, but no regrets, I'll die on this hill. Hate bullies and liars with a passion.
"Most of it is a lie that they tell their own citizens, though, as America and the West only want democracy and promote it for their own ends. They destroy any democracy that might not align with their worldview or serve their interests.
The current administration is overtly doing what was previously done covertly. Dictators are acceptable as long as it is politically convenient. One of the most recent cases is Pakistan, where the army has taken over, and EU and Commonwealth election monitors did not issue even election monitor report even after two years. Instead, they have facilitated the murder and killing of Pakistani civilians. But maybe Pakistanis are brown-skinned, so for them, democracy is not allowed.
Pakistan should be under sanctions, but it is not, as it is providing ammunition for Ukraine. That is the biggest problem of the West: their hypocrisy. They are calling for democracy in Hong Kong, as that serves their own agendas, but will say nothing about an apartheid state like Israel."
"Imran Khan, the former prime minister, has been jailed without trial for the last two-plus years and has been kept in solitary confinement for months out of those. How many newspapers mention it in the West or make it a news topic? But this Hong Kong (HK) Jimmy Lai conviction will be the headlines in most of the Western media a clear example of propaganda to rile up the population against China and socialism.
This is why I laugh when people here on Hacker News mention China's control of media and its propaganda, when the Western media is no better than them. At least many Chinese citizens know they are being propagandized against and can filter it out."
better is a continuum across many dimensions. Therefore when you say "no better than" you're saying "worse than".
I'm not saying Western media is good, but it's really hard to argue that it's worse than the Chinese media, given the headline story above and our freedom to discuss it here and elsewhere.
Both can be bad, but one is more bad than the other.
Sure but this was prompted by the absurdly self-congratulatory "city on a hill" comment which shows how out of touch the West is with critical thought from the global south.
As originally used, the city on a hill comment was about aspirations, not achievements. IOW, the US was aspiring to be the city on the hill, not that it was.
And then JumpCrissCross's comment says that the US has stopped even aspiring to be the city on the hill.
It's a comment saying the US has fallen. How is that absurdly self-congratulatory?
The human condition is hypocrisy. The weak want fairness. The powerful want their power unbridled. Only anomalous humans can be powerful without abusing that power.
This feels very dismissive. The comment you responded is about the very real killing of a lot of people and your response is "at least we can talk about it?"
Being free to talk about the horrible things happening doesn't appear to stop them from happening so what exactly is your point here?
Exactly right. And what's more, I think this is cynically exploited by apologists who want to defend evil by resorting to whataboutisms. State sponsored troll farms are real and the market for buying and selling, and mobilizing accounts is increasingly mature. And even, dare I say, strategically and intellectually sophisticated in some ways while simultaneously being intellectually and ethically bankrupt.
But I actually don't think it's that hard to understand that (1) the US has significantly compromised moral authority, but also (2) China bad and (3) there's important differences of scale of moral offense depending on what you are talking about. You can land a perfectly coherent point about, say, China's hostile takeover of Hong Kong being bad, it's military ramp up to seize Taiwan by 2027 being bad. But too often, I think bad faith actors will intentionally exploit the complexity to try and muddy the waters, and the only reason it seems like it's hard to articulate the distinction online is because of motivated performances.
Of course there Poe's law element too, which is that you should never underestimate the ability of people online becoming confused about politically charged topics, but in this case I think it's a bit of column a, a bit of column b synergistically amplifying one another.
By “calling out” you mean invading, or what, exactly? And haven’t you guys had enough of fighting “evil” while causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians? See Iraq.
So then what use is any other approach than simply letting it happen? Words are just that. If violence is out, then the only other approach is escalating the trade war and Chinese isolation, at great cost.
"The colonial government used the Control of Publications Consolidation Ordinance (1951) to regulate publications and suppress freedom of the press. One notable case resulted in the suppression of the newspaper Ta Kung Pao for six months (later reduced to 12 days) for its criticism of the colonial government's deportation of the Federation of Trade Unions-backed fire relief organisation officials and use of live fire against protestors. Deportation was also used as a method to control politics in education. Lo Tong, a principal at a pro-Beijing, patriotic middle school, had been deported in 1950 for raising the People's Republic of China (PRC) flag and singing the national anthem at his school." [1]
Now of course we'd all prefer Western-style freedoms but the narrative on HK is highly skewed and hypocritical, with HK used as a pawn in the broader anti-China narrative.
Even Singapore isn't exactly rosy but it is a friend of the West so it's fine.
America was on the decline for a while already. Look at how forgotten Tibet is. Why would HK be any different when a treaty was signed to hand it over? It’s more official than Tibet which was just annexed through force. Although it’s worth remembering that China has violated the terms of the HK treaty as well.
Also as a reminder, back in 1993 Richard Gere was banned from the Oscars for 20 years for advocating for Tibet (https://www.foxnews.com/media/richard-gere-speaks-out-nearly...). American institutions have been declining/corrupted for a lot longer than the current administration.
Tibet is clear-cut annexation of a sovereign country. HK / New Territories was only leased, and it wasn't going to be practical to keep it longer. The problem is that Beijing no longer needed HK as a gateway, the US/EU had already embraced going directly to the mainland to do deals by the early 2000s. The HK I knew was already gone by 2014.
Why is this evil? Most countries draw the line at aiding and abetting foreign harm to your own country, no matter how justified. I would expect no different if it happened in America or Europe.
> Most countries draw the line at aiding and abetting foreign harm to your own country, no matter how justified
On the books maybe. But for instance, America defines treason so narrowly that nobody has been convicted of it since WW2. Americans are free to sing praise of China, Russia, North Korea, whoever they like no matter how unjustified. Unless Congress has declared a war, which hasn't happened since WW2, you can talk as much smack about America or praise opposing regimes as much as you like.
If you start a website that is too friendly to a foreign regime, it risks being shut down by the FBI. That’s what happened to the American Heritage Tribune.
The US power nexus absolutely suppresses dissident speech, whether through lawsuits, deplatforming, de-banking, or any of a variety of other means.
The Soviets would have developed the atomic bomb (and eventually the hydrogen bomb). This simply accelerated their development. And considering that for the first decade after the end of WW2 the US considered and threatened the USSR with nuclear annihilation frequently, this is probably a good development...
Soviet under Stalin was just as bad as Germany under Hitler.
The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2 and the post war world would have been a much better place, including a non communist China. That's my guess at least. Impossible to know, of course.
In reality, the Rosenberg documents wasn't very decisive. Stalin already had the Manhattan Project blueprints from Klaus Fuchs.
> The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2
This is dubious, for several reasons: Public sentiment, starting another major war immediately after they thought they'd catch a break from war for a while. The premise of America building enough nukes to actually get the Soviets on their knees instead of provoking them to steamroll the rest of Europe instead. The ability of American forces, in the late 40s and early 50s, to get nuclear armed bombers over the appropriate targets in Russia.
Japan was already defeated, and two bombs proved enough to make them admit it. That context doesn't hold true for the Soviets; they may well have tanked several bombs to major cities then proceeded to fight a conventional war instead of surrender.
It's fascinating to read how few nuclear bombs we actually had until the 1950's. There was real concern that we would need more than two for Japan, and really had none ready after Fat Man and Little Boy were expended.
Almost as fascinating is how often in the late 40's and early 50's we threatened the USSR with nuclear weapons. Don't leave Iran quickly enough? We'll blast you. Amazing and scary how the world has survived so far...
Stalin was undoubtedly evil with the blood of millions on his hands.
I don't think that the West had any chance to liberate the Soviet bloc (I'm assuming what you meant is the Warsaw Pact countries). The Red Army was simply too big, too powerful, and too experienced at the end of WW2. Even using the few atomic bombs available between 1945-1949 (when the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon), the USSR was just too big a country, with too many people.
And if you look at the willingness to take casualties that the Red Army demonstrated while fighting the Nazis, trying to take on the USSR would have been folly.
The West was spent after WW2 (as were the Soviets), with no appetite for further conflict. Even the US was tired of war, and only the drumbeat against the Red Menace did much to motivate the populace.
Yeah, that's about it. General Patton, John von Neuman were among those advocating for it, and in hindsight I think it would have been a good thing to avoid the Cold War and the communist era, saving China from the horrific Mao era, etc.
But I agree that turning on an ally, sacrificing millions more of your soldiers etc at that point would have been a very hard sell. I'm sure I would have been opposed to it at the time.
As far as I can tell, the prosecution's entire case relies on an unfounded grand conspiracy argument. That by running a newspaper which supported democracy, Lai was implicitly calling on the US to impose sanctions on China.
Lai admitted to explicitly doing this - https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/32... - I believe he said he did this on multiple occasions. His arguments make no sense at all because, given his background, the only possible interpretation of that course of action would be to use sanctions to change the government.
Also, if Lai genuinely believed (as I think he must have done) that the US was going to help in any way then he was delusional. In almost every case, "freedom" fighters end up relying on the resources of hostile foreign governments to continue their activities. There is no way that the US was going to offer anything other than a publicity stunt.
That this is the top comment says all you need to know about this board.
Being a city on the hill is a cudgel, not a halo. It’s always been used in a self-serving way, and always against enemies.
Who is someone who points out the flaws of their enemies but never the flaws of themselves or their friends, even though they are all equally likely to commit the same crimes?[1] That is a scoundrel. Not someone that anyone needs to wait to Call Out anyone on anything.
That it is (in this context) a self-admitted “aspiration” is the laughable part. No one else gets credit for “aspiring” (just words) to be a city on a hill. Except if it’s us.
every president who ever invoked the "city on a hill" metaphor was simultaneously responsible for acts of unprecedented evil in foreign countries; from JFK in southeast asia, to reagan in the middle east and central america, to obama's drone strikes in the middle east.
Oh yes, I'm sure we all can easily enumerate the times America has effectively called out the "evil abroad." And such instances have all indeed survived the scrutiny of history/retrospection no less!
Yep! It's meant to indicate the absurdity of the point. Probably not my best form, but for a state that murdered literally millions of people the first two decades of this millennium, I would of hoped the intent would have been more obvious here.
It's the entrenchment of a particular kind of parasitic elite.
The logic that made them into "elites" has turned in on itself and is now self-cannibalizing.
The saving grace is only the capacity for the American people to see through this, but with the derangement of information pathways we're increasingly at the behest of these people and their narratives that only serve their aggrandizement.
All the talk about "saving the west" or "individualism" or the some other talk of spirit that these preachers sermon about, is only to serve themselves and no one else.
"Calling out evil" is another one of those victims to their self-serving motivations. Along with "climate change", "environmentalism", "democracy", "freedom", or a whole host of otherwise genuinely noble causes.
Democracy that we knew from 60s to 00s is effectively dead everywhere. I would like to think that social media and surveillance technology both played roles in accomplishing that so quickly and without public outcry/protests. All that blood spilled in 1900s to spread democracy wiped out in a matter of couple of years.
The Heritage Foundation has been operating since 70s. They've played the long game, and it's only now that we are, en masse, looking at the culmination of decades of work by them and thinking, "wow, that was quick!".
> both played roles in accomplishing that so quickly and without public outcry/protests.
Bread and circuses. Everyone is comfortable and entertained to the point of drooling. They won't be leaving their cozy warm houses with TV and video games to do anything. Brain isn't built that way. If it were, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. It'll always be short-term rewards over long-term most of the time for most people.
On the other hand, none of this is sustainable in the long-run, so it'll all come crashing down and things will work out. We'll probably be dead long before then though. Gotta go through some rough shit first.
It never existed in the first place. You just were unable to see the machinations behind the scenes when all of media was a newspaper and 3 TV stations.
I've found the most freedom on the fringes of the earth. Rural South America and Kurdish Syria to name a couple.
Anywhere with any real government though, it's dead. My theory is the period of classical liberalism in the world was largely a result of the brief period where firearms were the main form of warfare, which represented a short period in history where violence was most decentralized and the government had the least leverage. Before that it was years to train archers or swordsman, after that fighter jets/ missiles / technology tilted back in power of government. In the golden era of the age of the firearm one person was basically one vote of violence (giving the populace the greater leverage); whereas before/after that time each vote was heavily weighted by a government actor.
Can you elaborate on that? Sounds really interesting.
I grew up in a place you could call “rural South America” (specifically in a rural border town between Brazil and Uruguay) and at the time didn’t feel free there, but these days there’s a lot I think I could appreciate about the place if I were to go back (I’ve been living in the US for the past 13 years).
Reading the parent comment, I assume their use of 'freedom' more closely aligns with being undisturbed by a government.
It's a very common usage in America, focusing on "Freedom from X" rather than "Freedom to do Y", the latter of which often needs some sort of societal protection, most often provided by said government.
Interestingly, places that used to be shit holes are becoming better or at least show a desire for becoming better. For example in eastern Europe, there are movements that demands democracy and destruction of the establishment.
So if all the world is against the establishment, it only makes sense that shit holes become better places and better place become shit holes.
That's it I suspect that these moments can be quite fragile. Turkey was crashed, Georgia was crashed, Belarus was crashed, Russia was crashed, Ukraine is fighting generational war, Serbia is teetering, Bulgaria is on to something but its only a spark ATM. However, the crashed ones also did not stabilize, they just become brutal and visibly oppressed and IMHO anything still can happen.
Agreed but even in places like South Korea where they staged national weekend strikes to remove a sitting president, it’s withering away. People are tired of politics and politicians. It’s death by apathy.
I tend to believe that Communism provided enough of a threat to the Western elites that they felt forced to keep their countries visibly better. Not ready to defend this argument right now, I just think it does hold water.
There's a very common line of thinking that goes like this:
From the end of WWII until the fall of communism, the public in the West (as opposed to the elites) enjoyed much better treatment, and prospered more than ever before or since. This would include both fiscal gains, and the public's opinion being truly taken into consideration. This is mainly because the elites were afraid of people turning socialist / communist, so they gave them a reason to actually be invested in the system. Once that threat of communism evaporated, the elites could proceed to gut the majority as in the previous centuries with no fear whatsoever.
My comments:
I'm not sure I agree with that, though, too simplistic. On the other hand, I also think that people have a rose-tinted view of what "democracy" always was - with enough money / media control and a bit of time, you can convince the majority of anything, anywhere. Letting people prosper does make it easier. Maybe it did play a bit of a role. A counter argument is that (independent) media coverage made the Vietnam war unpopular, and then the US pulled out because of that, a miracle of democracy which never really came close to happening again ever after.
But I think the USSR itself murdered any real chances of communism's further spread in 1968, when they invaded Czechoslovakia. (The Hungarian thing in 1956 isn't nearly as important because of country's undeniable previous Axis affiliation; few had sympathy for that back then). The US and west in general couldn't get rid of their Woody Guthries, and their Klaus Fuchses, until USSR did it for them through sheer idiocy. But after that, was communism really a threat?
But I do think that the 1950s policies were affected by the war (+ Korean war) even more than communism itself. All these traumatized vets, desensitized to violence, were now back home, and the elites were truly afraid. But that doesn't seem like it brought democracy in today's sense of the word? There's a reason why feminism regressed in the 50s - letting men be little despots in their own (cheaply bought) homes was the least the government could do. But that seems to have lasted only until the mid 60s, then the Vietnam thing happened, ... Let's not go further.
Most left wing movements and organisations in the West drew strength from the existence of strong socialist states, both materially and ideologically. These kinds of groups were a balancing force against the right wing/capitalist direction, which is inherently undemocratic, having as its logical endpoint the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
I think the true decline begun earlier though, around the Thatcher-Reagan era, with the erosion of all kinds of state ownership and control of our economy and broad attacks on organised labour.
Is quite an assumption to make left wing movements and organizations in the West the defender of democracy. And another assumption to make the right movements the enemy of democracy. Also, take it from me who lived 15 years in communist Romania - the socialist states were very weak relative to the West.
Concentration of wealth and power was (and is) the highest in communist dictatorships - literally a handful (i.e. less than 5) people control pretty much everything in Cuba. North Korea is ruled with an iron fist by 1 guy - that is some concentration of power, right? In Communist Romania / East Germany power was concentrated in 2 people (a couple). In USSR power was concentrated in the 7 members of PolitBuro. In China power used to be concentrated in the hands of Mao Zhedong, now it seems it is concentrated in the hands of Xi Ping (but I could be wrong about Xi Ping. Maybe he shares some power with other people). I could go on forever, baby!!!
Capitalism has its problems but capitalism is quite fine all kinds of political systems - see German capitalism before, during, and following Hitler's rule.
I agree. I also challenge readers to watch TV broadcasts from politicians speaking in 70s, 80s and even 90s. You won't even believe your ears. But, the slow takeover of the world by international conglomerates buying up everything else, merging and bankrupting competition just doesn't seem to be on anyones mind with any power to deal with it. An acquaintance works at one of these Frankensteins monsters and there is a hodge podge of internal systems. It's hard to believe how many companies they have bought up over the decades.
"There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime."
> The law was enacted without consulting the Hong Kong legislature and gave authorities broad powers to charge and jail people they deemed a threat to the city's law and order, or the government's stability.
The UK throwing a very big rock at a thin glass house.
I don’t agree with any such laws in any country, but I think it’s important to point out the hypocrisy here
When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”
Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.
If you find this line of argumentation compelling there’s no discussing anything with you.
You can easily call out way more recent stuff such as what's happening in central America right now with Colombia and Venezuela.
Sinking half a dozen ships in international waters is a crime.
Sanity would ask for intercepting those boats in your waters, and that's it, controlling what's in them, who are these people and send them in front of a court if they breached your law, on your soil (or waters).
Yet we are at the point nobody raises the voice where sinking civilian ships on the basis it's drug smugglers (without providing a proof, let alone the fact that even if it was true it's still insane) has any leftover of decency or justice.
Or calling for the annexation of Greenland and Panama by any means.
Or bombing Iran on the basis that it's developing nuclear weapons on behalf of the Israeli government (which is an act of war if Iran could wage it, the US does not get to decide who can have a nuclear weapon and who does not).
The list of breaches in decency or law is basically infinite.
As much as I agree with you. Iran is signatory of the NPT with all its consequences.
Instead of letting more countries develop these weapons, we should work on denuclearizing all countries, starting with the US and Russia and their insane arsenals! And maybe build a unified international legal framework for civilian nuclear developments and applications from energy to medical outside of the "security council's" ferule!
There's a very precise protocol when a signatory of the NPT is suspected of breaching it: first it has to go through the IAEA which has to be able to inspect whatever site, then it gets escalated to the UN, then a decision is taken, at the UN level on the matter.
Not unilaterally by Israel calling the world's superpower for help.
Your logic is as sound as "since my neighbor makes something illegal at home, I'm gonna shoot him and then call my buddy sheriff for help". It is obviously illegal.
You're not wrong, but I just wanted to point out that this level of arbitrary executive behavior and blatant massive government corruption is pretty new to us (the many millions of decent US citizens who are appalled at it), and we're still trying to figure out what the heck we can do about it. So at least for now I really hope it's valid to ascribe this just to the current administration, not assume the US will stay like this.
This isn't about things that happened decades or centuries ago though. It's about how right now, today, the UK is arresting 12,000 people a year, 30 a day, for supposedly "offensive" posts on social media.
As your own article points out that stuff has been on the statute books for years (covering stuff which is generally illegal everywhere like death threats as well as stuff which was merely allegedly sent to cause others distress or anxiety) and convictions actually fell between 2015 and 2023. For all its much vaunted constitutional protections, the United States has also arrested a whole bunch of people for vague and difficult to call a crime stuff like Charlie Kirk memes or (nuanced or otherwise) criticisms of Israeli policy recently as well as more obviously menacing stuff that happened to take the form of social media communication.
Neither are quite the same thing as railroading a government critic for "sedition"
The current UK government has arrested over 2000 people for holding signs on charges of terrorism, and is currently in the process of abolishing jury trials. This isn't about history.
My point is that a country may do reprehensible things, but that does not mean that the people in that country approve of those things -- or even that the people in government approve of them. Countries can be complex, with many contradictions, opinions, and opposing forces.
Your examples are a bit weasely because they happened long ago, and so seem sillier. What I assumed was meant here is that, currently, the UK government is out to punish wrongthink.
> When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”.
What's the solution? The alternative, where we can't criticize our governments on account of their hypocrisies and imperfections, robs citizens of their check against an institution with a monopoly on violence.
> Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.
There's certainly a difference between holding countries responsible for events that have long since ceased and holding a government responsible for double standards practiced presently. The UK lacks credibility on Hong Kong when its own citizens are being jailed on the basis of overbroad hate speech regulations and when its government agencies attempt to claim extraterritorial jurisdiction over the operation of foreign social media companies. Westminister can't be so empty-headed as to believe that its actions will go unnoticed by other governments.
It goes beyond just pointing out hypocrisy. This is a well known propaganda strategy called "Whataboutism." [1] It's unfortunately a tremendously effective smokescreen that divides the audience and shuts down meaningful debate.
There is some nuance, because I’ve also seen genuine discussion falsely labeled as whataboutism.
If the point in bringing up the hypocrisy is to end or distract the discussion, it is whataboutism. However, if the point is to compare two instances of a thing to make a point it’s fair game imo.
I don't see slavery as an albatross. If anything, America accelerated its demise by its abolition at home --where America wasn't even the biggest enslaver of people; Brazil, The British empire (Caribbean), France (colonies), Russia (serfs), had way, way more slaves than the US. Today, India, China, Horn of Africa, NK have large slave populations.
>When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”
There is nothing logically wrong with hypocrisy. I tell my toddlers not to do stuff I do all the time.
The problem with hypocrisy comes when one party is assumed to have more rights than the other. In this case, why would Britain (or the US's) government be allowed to be more corrupt than China's?
I assume Britain is brought up due to the British government's historic role in Hong Kong and China.
Even bad people can be correct. Evaluate every claim on its merits, as opposed to its speaker. Only when you get down to resolving ambiguities is the evaluation of the speaker necessary.
I don't think that's really true and I live here. People are convicted for saying 'rude' things online all the time, even if some of those stories are also hyped up in the news. Attempting to backdoor/otherwise break e2e encryption... also literally the case. I'm not sure where you think the nuance is.
You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred. Nobody is allowed to shout fire in crowded theatre. Nobody has been convicted for saying something rude.
With relation to the article + Grand parent, the government first of all does not write on behalf of the BBC and in fact both Labour and Conservatives especially have had massive problems with its editorial decisions.
The ideal the you cannot criticise the government in the UK and that our laws here are similar to the ones in HK is honestly not a fair parallel at all.
I think the government are extremely naive and the security services try to push them into extremely stupid decisions on encryption.
> You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred.
I don't think that's a fair characterisation. Recently we've convicted:
- an ex-footballer (i.e. someone with the means to mount a proper defence) for calling someone a 'diversity hire'; and
- someone burning a religious text in the street, as a protest.
Are these really meeting your bar for inciting violence and/or hatred? At a level might warrant imprisonment? For me, these things are not even borderline; they are well into legitimate free speech territory and the government shouldn't be trying its best to stifle them.
And those are just successful convictions, not initiated prosecutions, or the wider chilling effects of it all.
Even if what you said were true, those two things are largely legal in the US, so I wouldn't really say it's their tabloids over-hyping it as much as they legitimately find the actual standards here questionable.
Haha - you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says. Donald Trump has also made flag burning a crime. So it's not as if the US is a champion of free speech anymore.
I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was deliberately trying to antagonise and abuse people upset which yes is illegal here. He could have easily made any points he wanted without abusing people. Note that he was given a suspended sentence in the hope that he would stop abusing people and has served no jail time as yet. Seems like a sensible decision.
The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about abuse online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
> you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says.
Does this matter? The question is whether the UK has a moral authority to tell China off over free speech. Nobody has said that different countries don't have varying types of restrictions on speech.
Even if I agreed with your characterisation of the US, you're talking about visitors, not residents or citizens. The UK also regularly denies visas for speech.
You're defending against whataboutism from China to the UK by invoking whataboutism from the UK to the US here.
> I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was harassing people online which yes is illegal here.
No, harassment is a specific and different offence. He was convicted specifically for sending 'grossly offensive' messages, not harassing people. The definition of that crime is based on the content of the messages, not the pattern of their transmission.
> The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
I don't really get how this refutes anything I've said. It's illegal to protest in this manner in the UK.
What is your argument here, that OK it's illegal but the punishment is not very severe so no problem? You understand that the specifics of _what_ is illegal is the criticism.
> Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about harassment online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
Neither of these is about harassment. Or they would have been convicted of harassment.
None of these laws limit your freedom of speech do they - you can perfectly well say you think that a TV presenter is incompetent without being arrested - it's the abuse that is the problem here. If your style of communication involves burning religious texts you must have very big mental health issues so I'm sorry for that.
> None of these laws limit your freedom of speech do they
Of course they do? Think we've descended into absurdity here if that's the claim.
Suffice to say, the Chinese response to Jimmy Lai would be along the lines of "well of course he has free speech, if only he did it in a completely different way that was acceptable to my sensibilities".
I'd like the right to burn any religious text I please, and to call someone a 'diversity hire', if those were my feelings. I thought that was clear from me using them as examples.
Crticisim of religion, through symbolic speech, is pretty classically part and parcel of the tenets of free speech. It's hardly some fringe belief.
Even if you think calling someone a 'diversity hire' is often untrue, or often racist, or some such thing, there are surely some cases where it is true or a legitimate criticism of hiring policy. Should we not be able to claim as much? On peril of imprisonment?
I don't think your views on this are particularly uncommon. It's just that British people don't have a history of wrestling with free speech, or its importance. Tone policing is a thought-terminating cliche in the UK.
On sentencing, Judge Menary KC told Barton: "Robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.
"But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.
"As the jury concluded, your offences exemplify behaviour that is beyond this limit – amounting to a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful."
Seems like you're just lying with the 'diversity hire' content of Barton's posts aren't you?
Well feel free to roll all those in to what I'd like the right to say. I'm going with the most outlandish thing (to me) that he was convicted on, because by definition even without the other things you've now quoted, the 'diversity hire' comment in and of itself was found to be illegal. Thus it's illegal to say for anyone, even if they don't also call someone a 'bike nonce' or photoshop them onto unsavoury images.
None of this meets the bar for me, and ironically would not be illegal in China or the US, to address the original point.
Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism? Who cares what the UK does when the subject is HK's obvious slide in to naked authoritarianism.
Because once upon a time it was with pride you could point out all the ways your democracy was different than “theirs”.
Now you’re just condemning what you’ve already done. Why should anyone respect it? At some point you loose respect and eventually you just look confused.
Whenever one 'side' makes a statement about the other it's often dripped in some kind of righteous indignation or other moralistic tone, so it's hard not to descend into whataboutism in those cases. The Chinese, of course, do this too, just with their own ideology baked in.
Why shouldn’t it boil down to “whataboutism”, aka comparison and putting things into context? Especially during UK’s obvious slide in to disguised authoritarianism.
One can also ask how HK ended up with English language and common law in the first place… though that wasn’t so recent.
> Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism?
Unfortunately, just like whataboutism can be a disingenuous rhetorical device, so is anti-whataboutism. Sometimes the comparison is relevant, sometimes it's not. In this case, I think it is.
Great Britain is very directly involved in a whole bunch of relatively recent messes in the Middle East, China, etc.
It's not whataboutism to point up the current messed up situation is not unrelated to the behavior of the UK, and their fingerprints are all over it. Of course things aren't static and new actors have changed the conversation, but this doesn't absolve them and they shouldn't be pointing fingers.
Since it fell from power, the UK does everything the US wants.
However, historically it set up a lot of bad things that happened in the Middle East, China, Africa, etc. The UK cannot untangle itself from it, "it's all in the past", because history is terribly influenced by things in the past, by definition.
So do you think citizens of the UK should be held accountable somehow? I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
Authorities and government? Yes. Even if the current ones weren't born when history was made, it's their duty to understand the history of the country they are governing, and of how past decisions shaped the world as it currently is.
> I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
The history of Hong Kong itself is deeply influenced by Great Britain's actions (as well as other world powers, of course), and it doesn't start with mainland China's takeover.
Another example of UK's actions deeply influencing the current world, unrelated to China, is Iran (and well, the Middle East in general). So the UK cannot simply point fingers at others and forget about how they helped shape the situation.
No, that's not the right takeaway, at least for me. For me it means that even if a country isn't perfect, doesn't automatically mean they can't be against others doing harm.
It really is crazy. A lot of people here seem to miss the relative nature of countries' behavior and think they're all as bad as each other when the difference is huge.
Especially when it comes to China and Russia, people seem to think they're about as bad as the West when nothing could be further from the truth.
Maybe thats due to more people from the hard right haunting this place, or the general shift of the tech crowd to the right. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
I'm sorry, but "calling out apparent injustice" is not comparable to "literally throwing the first rock to stone someone to death".
That quote gets bent very far out of context. You could use it to justify any inaction under that interpretation, on the theory that you are not qualified to take it simply due to being imperfect.
Right, but you do realize that sentences can mean more than just the literal meaning it historically had?
Christ, we really need reading comprehension classes and ideally poetry classes or something similar, since people are unable to read more than the actual characters today it seems... Seems extra problematic in software/programming circles, maybe we need to add arts classes to science programs too?
If you wanted to reference the saying about people living in glass houses throwing stones, you should have referenced that one rather than a different quote about stones. They're not equivalent.
embedding-shape is quoting Jesus, who was in fact literally referring to killing people by throwing stones. (And, in fact, was talking to a mob that was literally about to do exactly that.)
If anything, these actions will make Taiwan even more opposed to unification with China and will strengthen their resolve to oppose China.
For China it would have made more sense long term to first "incorporate" Taiwan into their country and only after that start turning the screws on both Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Naw, now Taiwan will have a few years to realize being 1C2S is no big deal, kids in HK are going to mainland to party, next gen is going to be even more integrated thanks to patriotic education. In 5-10 years you'll have patriotic HKers lol at TWers being brained for for prefering Gaza solution over HK solution. Which realisitically is really what the offer is now.
The Taiwanese support for pro-independence actually skyrocketed in 2019. I don't think anything bad happening to Hong Kong activists would be a good look for China.
Yes in 2019, look what's happening to TW politics now, green fatigue, DPP anti PRC rhetoric secured a couple elections but now the island new gen is increasingly jaded and post political because they realize the DPP Anti PRC card isn't improving their QoL. VS a few years post getting crushed, HKers also post political who realized they can simply live much better lives by embracing mainland (SZ) and not be such nativist/supremecist. Reality is democratic and shitlib politics is structurally failling everywhere, if the authoritarian gives you a priveledged deal, many TWer might eventually take it. Just look at HK reaction to recent fire, HKers lamenting how much more SZ and mainland tier1s have their shit together. The vibe is changing. PRC needs carrot and stick for TW, like how it's always been. Let's be real, in a post TW crisis there will be winners and losers, TWers need to see how winners are treated (tier1 affordtable life style) and how losers are treated (Gaza). Nevermind DPP just banned XHS because they realize they're losing culture war to mainland.
The West would probably cut economic ties with China like they cut them with Russia. For the simple reason that economic ties would help their enemy.
Invadin Taiwan would have a huge negative impact in China. Another poster in this thread, in the process of contradicting himself, said that the longer PRC waits the stronger they become. The conclusion then being that the best course of action for China is to never invade Taiwan. I fully subscribe to this conclusion.
lol it's not contradictory, there are specific PRC strategic milestones that shifts TW scenario, or a broader push to boot US+co out of east asia and gain PRC asian hegemony from potential gamble to forgone. And that's what PRC ultimately wants, their own Monroe. There's a few components left that more or less secures this in next 10/20 years where balance of forces makes US posture existentially unfavorable. The intersection period is mid 2030s-2040s where basically broader strategic balance is baked in, it's just matter of watching relevant trend lines cross (or gap extend). Realistically that's when we can expect things to pop off. The best course of action is for PRC to NOT JUST INVADE TW, but use TW as cassus belli for broader east asian war with US+co to dismantal postwar hemisphereic US security archictecture. The conclusion is, TW is basically PRC's legitmate excuse to shoot US hardware for meddling in domestic Chinese civil war card, it's simply too good to squander right now. Now ultimately international law doesn't matter in WW3, but it helps to have legimate reason to start a constrained WW3 in a way that would cause third parties to sit out (why meddle in ongoing Chinese civil war) and ask why not be net winners while US and PRC and most of east asia "lose". Ultimately for PRC it shouldn't be enough for them to gain TW, but US must also lose east asia.
Ukraine could easily be protect if there was a will to do so in the West. Very few people want to go die fighting for a country they can't even point to on a map so the the most effective solution to defending Ukraine is off the table.
Not sure about "easily" but I believe the idea at this point is to not escalate, drag out the war and win on economic grounds. Of course dragging things out also comes at a huge price for Ukraine but the EU/US seem to have accepted that as the price to be paid despite the moral posturing.
This is definitely not the sort of "protection" I would rely on.
On the flip side though see how badly things are working out for Russia. I think EU will not do business with Russia for a generation. Russia is really fucked.
PRC sees the writing on the wall and, being the pragmatic bunch that they are, will probably not invade Taiwan. Unless Xi really controls the country 100% (this I do not know since I am not a Chinese observer) and goes crazy like Putin did.
I agree that it is just dragging on and that is what I meant by describing the alternative as easy. Sending money and weapons is just leading to more death and destruction and no victory for Ukraine.
I don't think Ukraine can win with the way things are going unless the West joins the fighting or Russia collapses. Waiting until Russia collapses will quite possibly be a long time which will result in a Pyrrhic victory for Ukraine. They will have an entire generation of dead men at the rate things are going.
PRC never advertised a timeline outside of implying national rejuvenation (which can't happen without reincorporating TW) by PLA centennial by 2049. If you depend on western propaganda like Davidson Window 2027 then you can keep thumb twiddling. What's likely going to happen is some inciting event or some engineered out of blue casus belli.
PRC doesn't have any capable enemies in the west, including US, that can prevent PRC from turning TW into a Gaza. Which PRC can do with purely mainland based fires at this point. The force balance is too lopsided off PRC shores now. PRC's fleet of PL191 can basically level all of Taiwan urban areas in a few months, weeks considering other munition stockpiles. They can build a few hundred more chasis and frankyl TW->Gaza would take a couple weeks. Otherwise every inch of TW is within a few minute strikes from mainland, so resupply is out of question. There's nothing preventing TW from becoming Gaza except Xi is kind of nice bro.
He's nice enough all things considered, nelson mandella kind of person in LKW words. It is statistically remarkable how dovish he has been given size of PRC military now, all historic hegemons even local were up to more violence by this stage of rise.
There really aren't anything substantial, nothing the west can sustain anymore let alone in 5/10 years or 2049. It may very well be PRC is poised to be the least biggest loser, aka relative winner. IMO we're in stage where the longer PRC waits and accumulates the harder they win and frankly there's shit all west is able to do about it (on procurement side over next 10-20 years) with gap extending in PRC favor.
I personally would like to see East Asia more unified and less reliant on an increasingly unstable country like the US. They will collectively have to rely on foreigners more in the future anyway due to low birth rates as Japan already does. A lot of people serving food were Chinese when I went there. About 50% of the tourists were also Chinese.
I think the sentiment is nice but historic greviences still strong. Utlimately the problem isn't more or less reliance on US security hedging but force balance being so lopsidded in PRC that US don't matter. Reminder TW use to have the largest airforce in East Asia. At somepoint (that we're probably well past), US not capable of east asia security gurantee. And whatever you think about recent PRC/JP tussle, and ignore takaichi picking fights with RU over sakahlin and SKR over dokodo within last few weeks, JP having maritime/territorial disputes with all her neighbours despite beign loser of WW2, where her borders should be prescribed by treaty, is going to lead to messy situations.
That was always meant to be transitional. Also, as China marches forward, Hong Kong loses its leverage over Beijing. Now it's just one of a dozen HK-like cities for China. It went from "little prince" to "problem child".
Certainly a factor: IIRC Hong Kong's GDP versus the mainland has gone from 20-30% to 2-3% in the ~28 years since the handover, as the mainland has modernized.
While that still puts in the ballpark of "top 5 cities", it's not quite the same (relative) prize as before.
I'm pretty sure China considers that as "signing under duress" and therefor invalid.
The relevant points on the timeline, from China's perspective, are:
China: Stop selling opium in our country.
UK: How about no?
China: We're kicking out your drug dealers.
UK: How about an Opium War?
China: Oh crap, you have way more guns. We surrender.
UK: OK We're taking HK for 100 years.
China: I guess we don't have any say in the matter....
A few years later...
China: We get HK back now, right?
UK: Yeah but we've altered the terms. Take it or leave it.
China: OK. I guess.
A few years later...
China: Now we have more guns so here are the new terms. Take it or leave.
UK: But our deal!!
Hong Kong was actually ceeded forever. Only the second treaty for New Territories was for 99 years.
There was no "take it or leave it" there was a negociated solution to protect the people of Hong Kong because with population growth it was hard to provide a good water supply.
If the CCP had not insisted otherwise the British would have made Hong Kong a full democracy as they wanted to. As a compromise 1 country 2 systems was agreed.
The CCP just cannot be trusted to ever abide by any treaty.
Don't do deals with non-democratic rulers, they can't be held accountable by even their own populations.
This was a joint agreement between two sovereigns. You’re correct to say that it’s within the power of a sovereign to reneg on their word, but it’s a violation of international law and the UK would have every right as a sovereign itself to seek redress through whatever means it deems appropriate.
Except they had an agreement for 50 years to keep it that way. So basically what you mean is anyone can change their mind, which means agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
> Agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
Pretty much. They are only as effective as the body trying to enforce it. The entire point of being a sovereign nation is nobody can force you to do anything. Now it is in a nation's self interest to not violate agreements and get along nicely, but sometimes the calculus changes and the punishment may not outweigh the benefits.
I don't really like what China did with Hong Kong, but some things you surely agree transcend 'contracts' or normative behavior. I can't, for example, agree to be murdered in exchange for money. I might also lie to protect my children from the local murderer, or in any other case where I'd consider the outcomes 'extereme'.
PRC finally enforced it. HK had high degree of autonomy (not full autonomy), and high degreed their way to not implement national security law for 20 years leading to compadrors like Lai to exist (incidentally also the largest CIA base in Asia was in HK). Imagine a region in your country with zero national security ordinance for 20 years during geopolitical competition while nativist/traitors (I'm sorry democracy activists) shake hands with Mike Pompeo lol. TLDR traitors fucked around and found out and now we finally have sustainable 1C2S.
What you are stating is exactly the viewpoint of the CCP (or any other authoritarian governments).
Everyone who advocates for basic human rights, as written in the UN's basic human rights charter, is considered a traitor, a threat to national "security", or a terrorist. They want absolutely obedient people who don't know about their own rights.
No, literally no soverign country would allow a region to operate without national security umbrella for decades, PRC was retardly patient, magnanoumous so to let HK fuck around for so long. The fact is nativist HKers tried to carve a NSL state of exception and they correctly got their shit kicked in once PRC ran out of patience. Human rights > national security is frankly absurdly unserious position to take. It's historically more normal to throw HK into the torment nexus than to have it exist without NSL coverage, that's level of security vacuum is functionally fail state behavior.
UN particapation is indeed varying level of compardour behavior, but also frequently not since you know even independant raprateurs go through filtering process frequently supported to host country to represent their geopolitical interests.
What is obviously traitorous, is shaking hands with ex head of CIA, we lie we cheat we steal Pompeo, during ongoing Sino-US geopolitical cold war, while advocating for sanctions on your own people. That's not obedience, that's treason. Like even fucking obedient people know having the right to commit treason, which Lai did, is retarded. A position an unforutnate amount of retarded HKers took to heart and frankly need to be reeducated out of.
> No, literally no soverign country would allow a region to operate without national security umbrella for decades...
In other "normal" sovereign countries, the "national security umbrella" is defined by representatives voted by the people. Suspected violators are prosecuted by a fair court, with a jury determining the validity of the charges. I don't think either of those is the case for Hong Kong.
> Human rights > national security is frankly absurdly unserious position to take.
Again, in any state with decent democracy, the law states otherwise. A nation is formed to protect the rights of its people, not to take those rights away.
> What is obviously traitorous, is shaking hands with ex head of CIA, we lie we cheat we steal Pompeo, during ongoing Sino-US geopolitical cold war, while advocating for sanctions on your own people. That's not obedience, that's treason.
That is rarely considered a national security case in any decent democratic country. He was actually exercising his freedom of speech, as defined in the UN's basic human rights charter I mentioned earlier. Limiting which political viewpoints are "allowed" is a classical, textbook example of authoritarianism.
List one normal decent democracy without NSL law. You will find the answer is none. There's a jury in some HK NSL law (for low level protestor), people got off for light greviances in the past despite Beijing protest. Lai gettign 3 judge speedrun because he's simply an obvious comprador traitor.
And let's not forget this NSL dalying was an failure of HK making, i.e. basically failed state behavior that HK incompetence generated. Frankly that's demonstration HK isn't ready for democracy at all.
And no a national is formed to sustain the nation, eitherway you can't protect people without NSL... and btw that's what PRC did, protect 1400m people from HK traitors by closing their treason lifehack loophole. It's basic statecraft.
Yes and trading secrets and espionage with geopolitical adversary is muh freedom of speech and not espionage. Again unserious, exactly why HK needs to be reeducated. You're conflating disset (speech) with collusion (treason), Lai colluded, which is unprotected speech anywhere.
I can't tell if this is an advocate for Chinese dictatorship or simply a terminally online foreign policy expert hobbyist. The grammar is signature pol/ncd.
Can't I be both. This just primarily PRC geopolitics shitpost account (because ppl get wierdly stalkery if I talk PRC geopolitics on main account) along with some lifting. The lack of grammar and care is because talking about geopolitics online doesn't warrant higher effort.
Regardess above comment isn't even about PRC system. It's about how HKers and their supporters who thinks it's reasonable for city of 7m to have no NSL coverage while serving as intelligence hub for PRC geopolitical adversaries is delulu and unserious position. Anyone rubbing 2 brain cells together should understand how anomlous and not sustainable that arrangement was, and indeed it was never suppose to be that way if not for sheer HK arrogance to skirt NSL implementation requirements and PRC patience.
Mr. Lai is the real deal. He started out as a child laborer and worked his way up from nothing to owning a clothing brand and then Apple Daily pro-democracy publisher. He had the option to leave Hong Kong, but stayed and kept up the fight.
He's facing life in prison right now, so this conviction puts everything on the line.
Glad to see this hitting the front page. I posted an article earlier with not much movement which was really worrying for the HK free thought movement; happy that this turned out to not be the case.
I did some consulting for Jimmy at Apple Daily, and he took me out to the best street-food lunches I ever had. His car took us to a busy street corner, where four of us had a huge lunch for two hours while the car disappeared. When the car magically showed up at the end, Jimmy told me that he paid ~$20 for that amazing food for all of us. No pretense. A lovely man. Very sad.
Alexei Navalny’s death, leaving behind his wife and two children, showed the harsh reality that martyrdom isn't always worth it. Sacrifice is not always rewarded. Sometimes the tyrants win. Unless you believe in karma or divine retribution.
I think Navalny was counting on the Russian people to respond strongly. Unfortunately after his death, everything carried on as normal. Western governments continue to be a soft touch and buy oil from Russia. I'm not sure he would still give his life after seeing how the world failed him.
The US is currently expelling students, firing professors and college presidents and so on, not because they aren't US aligned, but because they allow people on campus to criticize Israel.
CBS just got taken over by the same cabal.
Amidst ICE grabbing people out of Home Depot parking lots in the US, China is just doing the same thing over there.
The emphasis on "citizen" was not clear in my original comment. The OP I was replying to did not make this distinction clear with "expelling students".
Dictatorship of the proletariat jails a member of the bourgeoisie notable for calling for the restoration of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and conspiring with agents of bourgeois states to that end. This doesn't seem surprising? A revolutionary state working to prevent counterrevolution?
Imagine a major city in America that were politically dominated y China for 50+ years and it is hard to imagine this type of blowback not occuring eventually.
Is it possible to get a fair and just trial in China? I have trouble accepting this or any verdict from a Chinese court and would appreciate examples that counter this.
Of course it's possible to get a fair and just trial in China, since that can happen even coincidentally to the process. E.g. I'm sure an actual murderer has been given a just punishment in China, at some point in the history of the Chinese legal system.
Is it possible to get a fair trial if you're an enemy of the state? Well... what defines fair and just? In accordance with the will of the Chinese people? Or are we talking about Western standards?
> In accordance with the will of the Chinese people?
Since when did the Chinese people get a say? There is no way for them to express their "will" without overthrowing the communists. It's the will of Xi and that's it.
Like USA-standards, or past-Western standards. Currently USA's law is 'did you pay the president a bribe to be pardoned'. CCP looks positively enlightened compared to that.
Well it's possible in the same coincidental sense that I described, right? You can be railroaded _and_ be guilty of horrific crimes. It depends whether fairness and justness are properties of the process or the outcome.
Regardless, it's presumably all relative. At least there's certainly an ordering of states I'd rather have against me, as a person living in them. Maybe Sweden?
I think if it's coincidental, it cannot be fair right? Fair in the sense we're discussing here must mean a repeatable system. If a wrongful process arrives at the right conclusion, it's still not fair (e.g. let's say a bunch of people lynch someone accused of murdering a child, without hearing any evidence, and it turns out the suspect was really a child mudered: was the process "fair"?).
Or if you don't like the child murder analogy: suppose an FBI employee decided to betray the US to the Soviets out of money, not ideology (cue Robert Hanssen). The US is at this point in time still executing traitors to the state. They grab this Hanssen-type, send him to the electric chair (on faulty evidence or simply "vibes" of guilt), but later it turns out this person was really guilty. Was this process fair?
Maybe Sweden if relatively fairer, like you said. I suspect not. But even if it was relatively fair, what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?
It's possible for a meat grinder process to still be good at convicting, say, all murderers, at the cost of a few false positives. In a utilitarian sense that could be considered reasonable. And it might well be repeatable in a way. Even default-guilty is repeatable, and 'just' on those terms, as long as your pre-charging pipeline isn't kicking up too many false positives.
Really it's just about the definition of fairness or justness though. I'm not really disagreeing because I'm not putting forward definitions of my own either, but a lot of the comments here throw out the terms with some assumed meaning. For example, I'm pretty sure if you polled Chinese people, they wouldn't have a problem with the OP story's outcome. So does that make it democratic? Or good as a point of public policy? It's all a bit hand-wavey without specifying.
> what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?
Well we (I'm assuming) both live in the West and so we encounter the exceptionalist narrative of this place. Certainly HN is a Western forum. Most views of China held by people in the West are based on partial truths and thought-terminating cliches.
But that's kind of just how _people_ are the world over, no? Chinese people in Chinese forums have a parallel experience to this, just mirrored.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think we're in agreement.
I too think the situation is probably mirrored from China's side. I hope there are some people over there who can also understand there's some middle ground, that neither side is totally right or wrong, and that we both perceive the world in half-truths and thought-terminating cliches.
And yes, because I live in the West (well, Latin America, anyway) I'm more upset about the distortions from "our" side. I don't really get to witness the Chinese side. I'm very skeptical even of what "our" side claims the distortions on the Chinese side are, since I don't get to witness them directly and I have reason to be skeptical of my side's narrative.
To some extent, Somalia. They have a 'xeer' system which is by design independent of the government and works as essentially a peer-to-peer justice system but with a fairly common set of 'law' throughout the country. It works through a process of decentralized judges which are appealable through inter-tribal courts ensuring the process is largely divorced from both the government and any one tribe.
There have been a few cases of Somalis for example even killing government police/military and them being found not guilty in xeer court and even the government respected the decision.
The best measure I can think of is per capita prison population. It's not great because it doesn't directly address fairness but it's likely related.
Two countries, with roughly the same "fairness" of courts, should, ceteris paribus, have roughly the same per-capita prison population. By that measure, China would be slightly on the fairer end 92nd lowest out of 224.
I don't remember if HK does the same thing but China divides their police into two groups. The more common type are basically public safety officers. They are unarmed but I saw a few places where the had plastic riot shields and catch poles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_catcher#/media/File:Mancat... The armed police are only called out as needed.
The airport had a two of military guys standing at attention with rifles. They looked like a couple of wax figures until I saw them do a formal changing of the guard.
I don't know if anyone has assembled data on actual court records. How often are police charges prosecuted? How often do they go to trial? What percentage end up getting convictions? What are the average sentences?
It would also be good to decide what we're comparing it to. A rich white person in the US can expect a very different level of fairness than a poor black person. Is a random Chinese person's experience more like the rich white persons' or the poor black person's?
"Is it possible to get a fair and just trial in China?"
What makes you ask a such question? Here are some bad ideas which comes to my mind:
* you think China is inferior?
* or maybe Chinese are inferior?
* maybe you think they always lie?
* or maybe they don't have laws?
* maybe plain old racism?
Forgive me, but your question sounds so bad. Counter question, did any of war criminals get a fair trial in the USA? (I am not listing countries they did war crimes, because there are too many)
Obviously, it is that a political opponent of the administration is facing life in prison seemingly for being an outspoken critic of the administration.
He isn't a political opponent, he isn't a politician. He met with high-ranking officials of a foreign nation and lobbied them to take action that he believed would harm China and lead to a change in government.
I also wouldn't call him outspoken critic either. For obvious reasons, the main one being a level of economic development unknown in human history, there isn't very much to criticize outside of politics. His gripe is solely political in that he believes that a different system of government is required (one assumes with more input from people like himself, again though he isn't a politician and, afaik, has no real political positions apart from supporting Trump and NY Post-style sensationalism/xenophobia, iirc they created a meme depicting mainlanders as locusts...it is quite funny to see people who, I can only assume, are not massive fans of Trump cream themselves over the Chinese equivalent).
This is sad to read as someone who only recently started appreciating Wong Kar Wai films and wants to visit. Although I have been reading about the speech/thought suppression and creative exodus for a long time.
Hong Kong the liberal democracy, that you think you knew, never existed. Most in HK will tell you that that have more freedom under China than they ever had under the British
In 1967 the Chinese people in Hong Kong were fighting against the English, English officers killed dozens of Chinese to retain their control on their "democracy". A city they had violently seized decades earlier to push opium and heroin on Chibese people, against the Chinese authorities wishes.
Now white, professional westerners who lost control of China weep and gnash about their supposed moral superiority over China.
Hong Kong is the only business friendly place in the world that’s genuinely independent of the US/EU transatlantic regulatory blob.
The mainland government want to keep it prosperous so will likely work to protect it from sanctions or international regulations.
If you’re a Russian oligarch it’s probably safer to keep your money in HK than Cayman or Switzerland these days. Even if you’re a petrostate sovereign wealth fund or non NATO central bank there’s some value in holding assets that can’t be frozen at will by the US treasury secretary.
You could argue that Signapaore and the UAE compete here but they have much more dependency on the west for security and diplomacy.
Well now it's dependent on the Chinese regulatory blob which I would argue is worse.
The EU is still debating after 3 years of war in Ukraine and weekly nuclear threats what to do with the Russian funds, let's be real, with the same situation in HK, the funds would have been seized within a week.
Well, recognizing Taiwan as an independent country for starters. The countries that recognize Taiwan are not recognized as independent states by China.
Remember, Hong Kong was supposed to be in a 50 year transition period from 1997 where there were supposed to be one country, two systems [1]. The national security legislation is just one in a long line of failures [2]. If nothing else was learned, it was this: China, specifically the CCP, cannot be trusted.
It makes me sick that the UK sends billions to Ukraine to interfere in a war we have no fundamental right to involve ourselves in, meanwhile, Hong Kong was allowed to fall with only light media coverage. It is outrageous. The politicians that oversaw it should be ashamed.
Not to mention that Carrie Lam, former leader of Hong Kong, sold her people up the river by allowing the national security law in [3]. She was even hiding out in the UK with her husband from her own countrymen.
Hong Kong Basic Law also required a national security law since 1997. Lets not be selective.
> Article 23 is an article of the Hong Kong Basic Law. It states that Hong Kong "shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies."
The only lesson that China can learn from Russia is to not invade their neighbor. It did not work out at all for Russia; if China invades Taiwan it will not work out for them either.
From China insisting that the two lands will be united no matter what while building weapons aimed at Taiwan and systems that will be very effective at shooting at Taiwan and building literal invasion barges that are only usable at invading little islands that have heavily built up the defenses on their beaches.
There’s no way China is going to be an aggressor. It’s more akin to “don’t come into my lawn or else”. If you don’t go into their lawn nothing happens.
Um, at the time of the National Security Legislation (your reference [2]), we were not sending billions to Ukraine, because Russia hadn't started their open attack yet.
In 2019, NPR's planet money did a segment on the Hong Kong protests that heavily featured Jimmy Lai. This segment from the end has always stuck with me.
GOLDSTEIN: China has not allowed more freedom of speech. Publications can still be shut down for criticizing the government. And yet, China has gotten richer. It started to develop its own financial center in Shanghai. Foreign money can now flow into China without going through Hong Kong, so the Chinese Communist Party doesn't need Hong Kong as much as it used to.
This has led to more and more tension between people in Hong Kong and the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government. In 2014, there was a fight over how to choose the government official who runs Hong Kong, and a million people in Hong Kong took to the streets to protest. Just last month, the government official who runs Hong Kong wanted to pass a new law that would allow people in Hong Kong to be extradited to China to stand trial. The people in Hong Kong said, we don't trust your mainland courts. Two million people protested in the streets, including, by the way, Jimmy Lai, who is now in his 70s.
What was it like? What was it like walking that day?
LAI: I was very excited - when you see so many people, you know, is fighting for a moral issue. We don't have guns. We don't have tanks. We don't have anything. The only thing we have the Chinese government don't is the moral authority we have, the moral courage we have.
GOLDSTEIN: The moral authority and courage, yeah.
LAI: Yes.
GOLDSTEIN: A few weeks later, on July 1, on the anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, protesters broke into the Hong Kong legislature buildings, smashed glass walls and spray-painted graffiti. Chinese leaders see these protesters and Jimmy Lai, for that matter, as agents for foreign influence - as, you know, basically latter-day colonialists. His house has been firebombed, and there was an assassination plot against him.
LAI: I stopped thinking about this because if I let the fear frighten me, I cannot go on, you know, because with what I have taken up, I have to sustain it. I will be the last to leave. That is like a captain who cannot jump the ship.
GOLDSTEIN: I mean, you're rich. You could leave if you wanted.
LAI: Yeah. If I'm rich but an a*hole...
GOLDSTEIN: (Laughter).
LAI: ...What my kids will think about me?
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah.
LAI: You know, being rich, you can be very poor...
GOLDSTEIN: Go on. Say more.
LAI: ...Because if you only have money, you lost the meaning, you lost the dignity, you lost everything as a human being. What else do you have?
Just remember when the press reports on foreign affairs, “pro democracy” means “pro capitalism, pro west” we don’t gaf about democracy or self determination. That’s why we ally with saudi arabia, israel, and invaded iraq.
I understand what you are trying to say and as much as I disagree with Israel, it is a democracy. We invaded Iraq for terrible reasons but it wasn't a "democracy" we were invading.
With regards to Israel, how can you have a democracy when more than half the population in palestine is under military rule and there is an addition to the basic law as of 2018 that israel is a jewish state and settlement is explicitly encouraged? It is an explicit apartheid regime committing a fascist genocide in the service of expansion.
Democracy for whom? Democracy to what end?
With respect to Iraq, it is true there was not a democracy there, but we did violate their self determination and installing an american viceroy is the opposite of democracy. Iraq had a welfare state that helped many citizens even if there were many features of the government I despise, but we destroyed it all and turned it into an experimental playground for American privatization efforts.
Iraq today is a self-governing parliamentary democracy and the US has had no direct say in their governance since the first parliament was seated in 2006. That the interim government installed by the US was not democratically elected doesn’t say all that much, especially given the country was in a state of civil war immediately following the removal of Saddam from power.
Democracy is a tool, and any tool can be used for good and bad. By good, that means for us full equlity, including self determination.
As an Assyrians, my nation suffered greatly under the old and the new regime, and will most certainly be eradicated.
Democracy didn't stop my assyrians from being taught Arabs and Kurds came to civilize, it didn't stop endless settlement of Arabs and Kurds, it certainty didn't stop the death threats, and most certianly didn't give us a voice that we could use, and it didn't help my nation from being forced to flee even in times of peace(like today).
After all my nation never chose to be part of said Iraq(or Turkey) and by extension it didn't chose to be part of said democracy
Sure, within the Green Line, the minority of Arabs who managed to avoid being expelled in 1948 are now citizens with equal legal rights, at least in theory. So it’s reasonable to argue that there is no apartheid regime there.
But that has nothing to do with the West Bank, which is where the accusation of apartheid is most credible.
This is, of course, why pro-Israel advocates always attempt to redirect the conversation to focus specifically on the Arab citizens of Israel within the Green Line when these matters are discussed.
Thank you for acknowledging that 2 million Arabs live in Israel with full citizenship and rights. That undermines the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
As for the West Bank, it's ruled by Fatah, not Israel. Israel provides for its own citizens -- regardless of ethnicity -- but it's not responsible for the citizens of foreign territories and their governments. Israel is under no obligation to provide services to foreign governments, especially those compromised by antisemitic terrorist organizations.
You've repeated this claim a few times in the thread, so sorry if this is repetitive, but just to recap:
1. Fatah is not allowed to build an airport in Palestinian territory -- the Israeli military controls its airspace.
2. Fatah is not able to determine who comes in and out of the territory -- Israel controls both its border with Israel (which I suppose is reasonable) and its border with Jordan (which is not).
3. Fatah does not control the population registry or decide who can receive a Palestinian ID card -- Israel does.
4. Fatah does not have a monopoly over the use of military force in the West Bank -- the Israeli military can (and does) operate wherever it wants to within the territory.
5. Fatah does not control who can move where within the West Bank -- there are many Israeli-only settlements and Israeli-only roads, with access controlled by the Israeli military and police. Even when moving between Palestinian areas, residents are often subject to Israeli checkpoints (with long lines).
Is Fatah allowed to control some civil matters, e.g. the education system? Sure.
I will let others reading this be the judge of whether this constitutes "Fatah control" or "Israeli control". To me, the answer is clear.
> Israel is under no obligation to provide services to foreign governments, especially those compromised by antisemitic terrorist organizations.
Obviously. Nobody is complaining, for example, that Israel doesn't provide services to Iranians or Syrians or Yemenis. Those are legitimately foreign countries that Israel doesn't control.
...
Taking a look at the rest of the thread, it seems that, having had no success justifying your ludicrous position that "Israel doesn't control the West Bank", you've instead pivoted to explaining how the fact that they control it is Palestinians' fault, or at least justifiable due to Israel's legitimate interest in preventing terrorism.
Well, which is it? Does Fatah control the West Bank, or does Israel control it but the occupation is justified?
There's a lot I could say about this topic, too, but I don't think I'll bother. Galloping from one canned talking point to the next faster than the points can be refuted is not a good-faith debating style and a waste of time to engage with.
Israel is not a democracy. You cannot call yourself a democracy when 5 million people live under your military occupation and are subject to military law without any political representation. An apartheid state cannot be a democracy.
The State of Israel controls certain territory which it administers democratically. It controls other territory in which only people of a particular ethnic/cultural group are citizens and everyone else is stateless and governed by military law. Conveniently, the latter territory is considered “not part of Israel” despite having been fully controlled by the state for many decades.
So, is Israel a democracy? I guess that depends on your definition of “democracy”, and also your definition of “Israel”.
> "It controls other territory in which only people of a particular ethnic/cultural group are citizens and everyone else is stateless and governed by military law."
This is simply not true. There are over 2 million Arab citizens in Israel, a full 21% of Israel's population. Another 4% are Bedouin.
You’re ignoring 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and 2 million in the Gaza Strip who are forced to live under Israel’s military occupation and law but do not have political representation in its government. That’s not even getting into discriminatory practices in Israel against its own Arab citizens. How about the fact that a Jew anywhere in the world can immigrate to Israel, but a Palestinian Arab whose family was forced out in the Nakba, with a valid claim to land in Israel, cannot.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005[0], evacuating every Jewish citizen and dismantling homes and synagogues. Today, there are zero Jews living in Gaza.
Gaza is run by Hamas and the West Bank by Fatah. Israel does not "control [that] territory" it does not block "other particular ethnic/cultural groups from becoming citizens", nor does it "govern [it] by military law." Israel does not govern or occupy either territory.
The West Bank is administered by the Israeli Civil Administration which is a branch of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Even the Israeli High Court of Justice (Supreme Court) says that "Israel holds the Area in belligerent occupation" and that "a military administration... continues to apply". [0]
Not to mention how the Israeli government allows over 700,000 illegal settlers to flood the West Bank and does absolutely nothing to stop them from stealing land or attacking Palestinians. The Israeli military has ultimate authority there. Like the other commenter said, it's a fantasy to claim otherwise.
Israel does have a military presence in the West Bank due to the monthly terrorist attacks on Jewish citizens in the West Bank and Israel, currently at 57 attacks per month this year.
As for settlers, I ask readers to observe the double standard: Jews who live in Palestinian areas are "illegal settlers" and "stealing land", but Arabs who live in Israel are entitled to free education, healthcare, citizenship, voting rights, and representation in the government.
By "Arabs who live in Israel" you mean the minority of Arabs who the Israelis didn't force out at gunpoint during Plan Dalet and the Nakba. The Israelis can rectify the situation at any time by either allowing the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to have a real state, not a puppet or rump state, or by incorporating them into Israel with full legal rights, political representation, and an end to military occupation.
Ah, the "Nakba", the catastrophe: the 1948 war where Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Islamic Holy War Army invaded Israel, despite being legally partitioned by the United Nations.
Yes, what a catastrophe that invasion was for Arab nations and Arab population in the land.
Perhaps if those nations had not invaded Israel, and perhaps if local Arab communities had not committed violence and massacres of local Jewish communities leading up to Jewish independence in 1948, things could have turned out better for them.
And maybe things can be different tomorrow, too, if Palestinians turn away from terrorism and seeking the destruction of the world's only Jewish homeland.
As for Gaza, it's ridiculous to say that Israel doesn't occupy it when even long before October 2023 the Israelis have imposed a complete blockade on the territory. They control the movement of goods, they control the water supply, the power supply, the airspace, they built a 20-foot wall around it, they destroyed the only airport, they control how far fishing boats can go out, and on and on. How is that not military control?
The claim that Israel doesn’t control the West Bank is utter fantasy. Yes, they allow a Palestinian civil administration to handle some of the work of governing, however it operates entirely under the ultimate authority of the Israeli military.
Btw, how many Palestinians are studying at Ari’el University in the West Bank?
Perhaps there would be more freedom and self-determination for the West Bank if the Fatah government redirected spending its resources from terrorism to infrastructure and services for its people?
In 2023, there were 214 terrorist attacks per month. Israel instituted more security checkpoints, which has resulted in a decline to 57 attacks/month this year.
And yet, 57 attacks per month still ridiculously high. What nation would tolerate that? Is it any wonder that there are security restrictions in place?
As for Ariel University, it is within a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, so Palestinians are generally opposed to its existence. (And indeed, opposed to the existence of Jews in the West Bank, which is a true form of racism and apartheid.) And yet, Ariel University does have a minority of Arab students among the Jewish majority.
Funny how you were originally arguing that Israel doesn't control the West Bank, but now you say "perhaps there would be more freedom and self-determination for the West Bank", correctly suggesting that there isn't self-determination now. So Israel does control it.
Fatah does rule the West Bank. That Israel has security checkpoints only reinforces the reality that Palestinian self-determination is undermined primarily not by Israel, but by its own violence against Jews.
If there weren't some 50 terror attacks per month coming out of the West Bank, Israel wouldn't have need for security checkpoints. If Hamas didn't invade Israel on October 7th 2023, Israel would have zero military presence in the strip like they did for 20 years prior.
Pro-Palestinian folks need to stop blaming the Jewish boogey man for Palestinian problems and start looking at the violence and hatred of Jews within their own camp.
OK, tell me how I can visit Ramallah without passing through Israeli checkpoints. I’m willing to go through the border with Jordan, or fly into Ramallah airport, and pass through Fatah customs. Surely that should be possible if Israel doesn’t administer the territory?
Sure. Just tell me how Israel should prevent the hundreds of terrorist attacks per month coming from the West Bank. There were 214 terrorist attacks per month in 2023, now down to 57/month today; thanks primarily to new security checkpoints.
Perhaps if Fatah would redirect its funding away from terrorism, there would be fewer security checkpoints and more self-determination for its people.
"pro-democracy" is code for agent/operative of a colonial power. It's why so many hong kong pro-"democracy" operatives fled to britain, germany, us, etc. And it's also why so may pro-"democracy" operatives end up in countries we have problems with. No pro-"democracy" operatives in allied countries like saudi arabia, qatar, etc. Strange.
> The law was enacted without consulting the Hong Kong legislature
And a plain reading of the Basic Law (Hong Kong's constitution) permits everything that's happened, and expecting the contrary seems like a coping mechanism. There are massive exemptions for Hong Kong's autonomy and deferrence to Beijing at Beijing's discretion, or by the Head of Hong Kong who is appointed by Beijing
I wasn't around for the handover so I'm largely exempt from the emotional marriage to an ideal Hong Kong residents and people affirming Hong Kong resident's feelings seem to have
The legislature wouldn't have to be consulted for the National Security Law to have been enacted, the article and seemingly all of the west seems to think that is a controversy when it isn't necessary
And then there is another layer where the structure of the legislature doesn't even match western ideals and wouldn't have made a difference. The legislature is 50% popular vote and 50% corporations. So even if 100% of the population voted for the same thing, they would only have 50% of the vote, and the corporations are all pro-Beijing by nature of being able to economically exist in that environment.
(Notably, the ancient City of London within London functions nearly the same way. Actually in an even more egregious way with the non-natural persons having a more extreme weighting of votes)
People act like a different founding document governs Hong Kong (Sino British joint declaration? Some comments by representatives), when it doesn't. People act like the governing document of Hong Kong was supposed to be ignored for 50 years, when something way different and way more integrated is supposed to happen at the end of the handover period.
I think there is zero path to the goals Hong Kong residents espouse and are used to. They’re imagining a different governing system than the one they live in, thats incompatible.
> there is zero path to the goals Hong Kong residents espouse and are used to
From talking to friends and relatives from HK I've seen huge diversity in how people think about HK, China, their relationship with each other, Mandarin, Cantonese, food, and "the West".
There are certainly large groups of HKers who would prefer for HK to seced from China. There are also many HKers who love the UK and mourn the loss of HK to China.
There are also huge swathes of the population that chaffed at being colonized. Long time residents can show you the old police barracks where British troops would beat the locals in black bag operations. They'll tell you about how the feng shui of the Bank of China Tower lead to the collapse of the British empire. They'll tell you that they spent their lives paying taxes into a "democracy" they never got to vote in.
The opinions within HK are far more diverse than we make them out to be.
Exactly, which goes to my point about the absurdity of the legislative body, even if 100% of residents voted for the same thing it would only be 50% of the vote, and 100% of residents won't vote for the same thing.
but the Sino British Joint Declaration is not the constitution of Hong Kong. It is not even an enforceable treaty.
Its analogous to an American finding a piece of the Declaration of Independence to confirm their views after finding the US constitution too inconvenient. A pointless exercise, levels worse than even the Federalist papers.
this guy was sold a false idea of "democracy" - however his sponsors no longer have powers to they used to think they have. hence his sponsors have thrown "democracy" in the trash.
previously, these well funded democracy - regime agents would win in many places, but now the tables have turned - america now has a demagogue as president.
One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad. Jimmy Lai should not have been allowed to this quietly.
> One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad.
"City-upon-a-hill" is marketing and has never been grounded in fact. It’s hubris and arrogance. The US is viewed as that place if you get on the wrong side of, it will bomb you or replace your government through coercion. It outspends every country on "defense" to ensure this.
History is littered with plenty of examples where the US favored a more authoritarian or "evil" government over less, sometimes even installing them. Arab Spring is a recent example where you saw governments replaced with the US' help, while leaving some notable monarchies alone.
In reality, the US employs its foreign policy for its own interests. It’s always been like that.
The Arab Spring is a bad example if you're trying to say that the US is installing governments... South America's history provides far better examples.
That said, the US doesn't need to be perfect to still be an example of providing freedom for its own citizens.
for its own citizens that were fortunate enough to be born at the right place at the right time. how should the rest of the world feel about the US if they get all the freedoms, comforts and opportunities and the rest of the world doesn’t?
Is that a country to be admired by all others or resented.
There’s a lot of examples, yes in South America too, but the US helped replace or tried to help replace some governments during the Arab Spring. Libya being the biggest example, where the US and its allies imposed a no fly zone to help topple a dictator it didn’t like [0]. It could have done that in other places, but you didn’t hear a peep from the US when those protests were crushed by their governments during the Arab Spring.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
Libya is a super super bad example if you're looking for bad US behavior. This is literally the very first sentence of your own source:
> On 19 March 2011, a NATO-led coalition began a military intervention into the ongoing Libyan Civil War to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSCR 1973).
Compared to the South America stuff, this is saintly and angelic behavior helping out the world in every way. It's not the US alone, it's a coalition that expands beyond NATO, there's a UN resolution...
In fact bringing this up as a "bad behavior" example proves just how much of a shining city on a hill the US has been around the world. It's been bad, but it's also done lots of good stuff.
I don't think you're understanding what OP actually said. They didn't cite the Libya example as an example of bad behaviour; there wasn't any value statement on it at all. They were saying the fact that they intervened in Libya but not elsewhere was an example of the US intervening when it suits them.
I'm not an expert in US foreign policy so I'll refrain from entering the debate itself, I just think you're not arguing against what the OP is actually saying.
> Libya is a super super bad example if you're looking for bad US behavior. This is literally the very first sentence of your own source:
> > On 19 March 2011, a NATO-led coalition
Contradicting yourself ?
States don't have friends, only interest (of transforming humans in bomb targets and genocide victims).
> States don't have friends, only interest
Quite the opposite. Actually states don't have interests - interest groups do - and those of them who are friends with the state get to install theirs as the state's.
> states don't have interests - interest groups do
People have interests. To promote those interests, they organise. Sometimes as interest groups within states. Sometimes as business corporations. Sometimes as states.
US probably never was "the good guy" and just acted on its own interests, but that's not the point. People believed that it's true. Or probably just internalized that as a part of a "country stereotype", like how Germans are hard-working and brits are polite. So it was OK and sometimes even expected for the US to scold the evildoers.
Now that changed, at least in my social circle, and US being moralistic is seen as hypocrisy.
> "City-upon-a-hill" is marketing and has never been grounded in fact.
Except for Germany 1945, Eastern Europe 1989, South Korea, etc. pp.
Kuwait 1991. Iraq NFZ 1992-2003. Haiti 1994. Ex-SFR Yugoslavia 1995. Again in 1999.
America has had a lot of less-than-ethical military adventurism, but it's also incorrect to say every instance of it was self-serving.
> Germany 1945
Huh? Soviet Union did the heavy lifting there
You could say soviets did all the WW2 heavy lifting, starting with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_tank_school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipetsk_fighter-pilot_school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomka_gas_test_site and
and culminating in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Oh! Really? https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/how-bushs-grandfa...
What happend in SK at the times was an authoritarian, maybe even police state. Not especially 'democratic'.
1989? Not that hard when 'mother russia' is collapsing, and occupied otherwise. For some decades, at least.
> In reality, the US employs its foreign policy for its own interests.
Sometimes I'm not even sure it's for it's own interests.
Most of the time when we people talk about the interests of a country they really mean the interest of a class of people within that country.
Someone can be and asshole and still be right. It will be harder to convince other people to go along with you if you are an asshole, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't call out wrongdoing when you see it.
But you're word doesn't really have weight, if you did the same thing 10min ago.
Which is a fair charge of ethical character, but not of truth. What makes whataboutism a fallacious rhetorical move is not that it fails to identify someone's ethical shortcomings, but that it tries to substitute them for subject matter.
The logic of whataboutism is fascinating, because as long as someone is deemed a bad enough actor, their statements have the effect of dynamically rewriting reality in real time to be the opposite of whatever Bad Actor says. Which, to my mind, gives them too much power. It's simpler to just believe in objective reality, believe that language works roughly according to a correspondence theory of truth and that statements are or are not legitimate on account of their corresponding to reality, which isn't something you can determine based on character alone.
But I admit on some level this might be a misunderstanding of whataboutism, because it's holding it to a standard of intellectual consistency that it's not aspiring to.
A "whataboutism" defense only works in an argument that goes like this:
A:"You should stop doing X because X is wrong and evil and you are wrong and evil if you continue doing X!"
B:"But you beat your wife."
Where X != "beating one's wife".
Here the B's argument is: "But you do X yourself!". This is not an attack on moral character but a direct refutation of A's argument. If A really thought X is wrong and evil then A would not be doing X. And if A really considers itself wrong and evil then it should be figuring a way to stop doing X first, or, at least, concurrently with demanding that from B. Either way, A is not very persuasive.
Something less effective about ass holes doing wrong things complaining about other assholes doing wrong things, a while insisting they're not assholes. Ultimately the "damage" isn't being called out as a hypocritic asshole, it's the world realize there's nothing wrong with said wrong things. Although to some that's not damage but nature healing.
Go back a couple more years, and the UK is probably more relevant to bring up (especially considering the context), they used to have similar aspirations before they learned better.
I would like to remind you that HK was a British colony for more than 100 years, and there was no democracy or freedom then. They only allowed the first partly free elections two years before they gave it back to China, in 1995. And not because they suddenly wanted freedom and democracy for HK, but because it would be harder for China and better for their own interests. Hypocrisy all the way.
That's kind of misleading. HK had a lot of civil freedoms (rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of speech). China explicitly blocked earlier democratization. The vote only managed to get through after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown made HK panic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_Hong_Kong
Those freedoms were never unlimited, even under British rule (colonial era sedition laws and public order restrictions existed).
No freedoms are ever unlimited, so that's not an interesting point. The question is, were they useful? A lot of HKers seem to think so.
> No freedoms are ever unlimited, so that's not an interesting point.
Of course no freedoms are unlimited, so I'm not sure why are you reading this literally?
> The question is, were they useful?
Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about the lack of freedom under British rule, and you ask if it was useful for HKers? While there are a lot of people in HK who are not happy about what China is doing now, there is almost no one who would take British rule over that. I actually talked with people about it in person when I was in HK.
They didn’t learn better. They lost their aspirations and decided to give up as a nation.
They didnt lose aspirations.
A lot of the UK seems to be struggling with their loss of Empire even 80 years later.
They ran out of money, 2 world wars bankrupted them.
They didn't run out of money just because they fought two wars. For some bizarre reason the UK has simply chosen to be (relatively) poor instead of embracing a growth policy. Despite all their potential advantages their GDP per capita is about equal to the poorest US state.
Since it's so germane, I'll share my little widget that compares EU countries to US states on various metrics: https://evmar.github.io/states/
It's actually a fun demo, that shows a fairly common difference between Europeans and Americans. The demo is mostly about comparing GDP, while HDI or something else more "human" is left as an exercise to the reader. If someone was doubting Americans only care about money, now you have some more evidence :)
Does Czechia really have 4 million square miles and NaN population?
That's pretty fun.
It's not surprising per se but it does put things in perspective that Texas has a bigger footprint than every country in Europe.
Yeah, money machine go brrrr is a great sign of "footprint", lets just ignore millenniums of inventions, technology and others things coming from Europe, before the US was even a colony. Texas GDP was $x millions last year, clearly larger footprint on the world :)
It's actually pretty fun and interesting the different bubbles we all live in, for better or worse.
> lets just ignore millenniums of inventions, technology and others things coming from Europe, before the US was even a colony
Those people are dead. They did great things. But it's irrelevant to their standing and influence today.
A really nifty tool, thank you!
BTW the population figure for Czechia is NaN, for some reason,
Alabama has GDP per capita higher than Finland? Hard to believe....
Maybe you can afford Universal Health Care after all...
This is actually the reason why I'm a proponent of the US Federal government doing far _far_ less. Things like Healthcare and other safety net things (along with most other things) should be done at the state level, and the the fact that European nations, which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things, are the proof that this would work.
I'm convinced that the federal government doing more and more things is the root cause if the increasing toxicity of American politics. The further removed a populace is from their representatives the less control they have and the worse they feel. Everything should always be done at the most local level that it is possible to do it. Some things have to be done at a relatively high level, but Americans have increasingly been jumping straight to "this is a job for the federal government" when very often state, or even city governments in some cases, would be perfectly capable.
> which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things
What do you mean that the countries are poorer? Are you just thinking about the gross salary people get per month, or is there something else in this calculation?
The fact that people get health care, parental leave, can freely move between countries, able to afford having a child, have emergency services that arrive relatively quick and all those things mean that a country is not poor, and the countries that don't have those, are "poorer", at least in my mind. When I think "poor country" I don't think about the GDP, but how well the citizens and residents are protected by ills.
I know you've made a handful of comments all to this effect throughout the thread, but it's really not helpful in this particular comment chain. Yes, we know your quality of life in Europe is great. Yes, we know life is more than just GDP. "What we mean that the countries are poorer" is obviously GDP in this comment chain, and this comment chain is not disputing your quality of life, it's pointing out that we (collectively) have the money to have that quality of life here in the US, too.
But thats a flawed metric. How much cash do you need saved to send 2 kids to university in US vs typical Europe, without burdening them for their best years of life with crushing debt? How much is left afterwards? How much after acquiring some long term illness with expensive treatment or being in bad accident? Don't think that due to being young this ain't your concern, all elders have messed up health in many ways. Retirement. And so on. These are direct costs and its all about money. Ie US couple with teens just about to go to college with say 500k are same or poorer than similar family in Europe having say 200k savings, or will be after few years. Or maybe not, depends.
I'd say its uncomparable directly, or very, very hard. You can say visit both places and walk around and see the general state of the country and its people, compare capitals. This is where money is spent (or not).
Not going into happiness, stress levels, depression/anxiety and meds consumption, obesity levels or longevity, that would be too easy I agree. Although this is also money related, more than anything else.
80% of US college grads have debt under 30k. Despite the bleak picture painted, servicing that interest at say 7% is $175 a month, or about 3.5% the average salary of a new grad.
This pales in comparison to some of the elephant in the room ways most common ways to go broke, which is to say get something like a child support judgement against you (20% pretax, like 26+% post-tax in middle income brackets) or have an alimony payment (these conveniently don't generally show up in bankruptcy statistics because they are not dischargeable). Medical debt can at least be discharged in bankruptcy.
The federal government has no constitutional authority to provide universal health care, per the 10th amendment which leaves an extremely narrow constraint of enumerated powers to the federal government and the rest left to the people and the states.
However, the feds already siphon about as much tax as the populace can bear just on accomplishing what it is allowed to do, so there is basically nothing left for the states to implement these kind of measures.
Yes, if the states were to take over many of these things, obviously federal taxes would need to dramatically decrease (luckily, the vast majority of federal spending is doing the things that I think states should do anyways, so you'd be simultaneously dramatically decreasing federal taxes and federal spending).
You couldn't just have the states take over these responsibilities and have nothing else change. My suggestion is in fact a pretty radical change in how the US federal government works. I'm not under any illusion that this is likely to happen. The ratchet of power unfortunately only goes in one direction.
Our GDP would drop several percent if we fixed our healthcare system. Part of why we look richer on paper is that we light a lot of money on fire for exactly nothing.
Not really. That money didn't appear out of thin air. It would be lit on fire for some other purpose instead.
Ah, there’s always zero-sum competition for housing to eat up any excess that might otherwise go to savings. That’s true. Money gets freed up across the board, you spend it on housing or lose ground in the housing competition. Good ol’ red queen’s race.
then prices will decrease and thus GDP will be lower, isn't it?
The American government spends an incredible amount on healthcare already. If it were competently administered, it would already be enough money to cover universal healthcare.
It's the cost of procedures/medication
Example: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...
And why, in free market land, is a buyer of services and medication, not allowed to negotiate prices?
Which buyer are you referring to? Consumers paying cash can negotiate as much as they want, and often secure large discounts. Commercial health plans also negotiate hard with their network providers, although some of them play unethical tricks with PBMs to artificially inflate prescription drug prices. Medicare and Medicaid don't really negotiate with providers, they just set rates by arbitrary fiat and providers can take it or leave it. Medicare does have some statutory limitations on how they can negotiate drug prices, though.
Its the cost of keeping American doctors living in mansions big enough to house a whole village.
Which doctors? Some specialists do quite well but many primary care physicians earn less than software developers, especially once you account for education expenses and ongoing mandatory professional expenses. What is the correct amount for them to earn anyway?
The ones in my town, I know where they live, up by the lake.
Above all it's great example of why we'd do well to drop our quasi-religious fetishization of GDP as an indicator.
Who is fetishizing GDP? I've never seen public policy be set based on the goal of maximizing GDP to the exclusion of all else. You're arguing against a strawman.
We already do have universal health care for the most expensive groups to insure (lower income households and the elderly), and technically have it for everyone in that hospitals aren't allowed to deny life saving care to anyone regardless of their ability to pay (which is expensive, short sighted, and quite inadequate overall).
Adding the rest of the population to the existing public insurance system would not cost much financially, but it would be a political catastrophe for whatever party implemented it if it didn't go well.
In short, I don't think anyone seriously argues the US can't afford universal health care, but the real and perceived risk of change is seen as too great politically.
It's worth pointing out this happened entirely post 2008. This is not some "decision" people took, or some long term loss of empire. The US recoevered from the 2008 crisis way better than everyone else, and nobody really understands why yet.
We know why, we just don't like it.
A country with a business friendly, low regulatory environment, coupled with a high work ethic and poor work/life balance, if nothing else, is not going to be a country that falls behind.
Americans complain a lot, and the system isn't that comfortable or respectful, but they aren't facing existential economic irrelevance.
> low regulatory environment
Quite the opposite. The US quickly recovered from 2008 thanks to tech. Tech that the rest of the world wasn't able to keep up with thanks to it being a heavily regulated environment (patents, copyright, etc.).
You would be hard pressed to find anyone who claims the EU has a "Tech Friendly" environment.
Every techie with skill and an idea in the EU said "F-this, I'm going to the US to start my company" which lead to others saying "F-this, I'm going to the US for tech work". There is no one to point the finger at, because even today, this is exactly what Europeans want. They just haven't put the pieces together to link "heavy regulation and very worker/consumer friendly environment" with "Nobody wants to plant their seeds here". Instead it seems the EUs plan is to just continually fine foreign tech companies to make up for the barren infertile business lands they cultivated.
Germany is a borderline shrinking economy with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts. And this is celebrated like it's some kind of triumph. Everyday I wish I could violently shake Europeans and beg them to open their eyes. Economic strain will fracture all of Europe.
> with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts
If true (seems dubious to me), that's a ~20% difference. The difference in wages is a lot larger than that though, at least for tech workers. So that doesn't really explain why German tech can't compete against US tech.
Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.
I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.
But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.
The only hope the EU has is that Trump fucks up the US enough in the next 3 years that we aren't able to continue to attract the vast majority of the people worldwide who actually want to work and reap the rewards of their efforts.
The EU has chosen stagnation, which seems fine at first but looks worse and worse as all the people (or nations in this case) who didn't make that choice continue to grow. Unless you have a closed, close knit community like the Amish, stagnation does not end well.
Please explain how US patent and copyright law prevents "the rest of the world" (which I assume really means the EU, because China seems to be doing just fine in their own sandbox) from developing a meaningful tech sector?
Doesn't China do well partly by ignoring our IP laws (and having access to a lot of our IP since they're in our supply chain)?
They have done very well in the manufacturing sector via IP theft starting in the 1970s.
I don't see how that's relevant to much post-2008 in the tech sector, which is primarily software driven and where China has very intentionally built their own walled garden.
> It's worth pointing out this happened entirely post 2008.
Really? Because IIRC, Britain has been steadily declining for over a century.
> The US recoevered from the 2008 crisis way better than everyone else, and nobody really understands why yet.
And Poland avoided the recession entirely.
Thanks Obama.
Decisions made in 2008 were also a huge part of this.
The UK had a framework to liquidate financial institutions that was similar to the US, and this was deployed in early 2008 with Northern Rock and B&B. The end result was a multi-billion pound profit to the government.
Gordon Brown then decided that he needed to lead the global economy (and he has written, at the last count, two books which explain in significant detail that he was a thought leader and economic visionary through this period) by bailing out banks that were large employers in his constituency. With RBS, this involved investing at a very high valuation and then shutting down all the profitable parts of the bank, the loss was £20-30bn. With HBOS, he forced the only safe bank to acquire them, this resulted in the safe bank going bankrupt a year after the financial crisis ended in the US, and another multi-billion pound loss.
The US benefitted massively from having one of the most successful financial executives of the period, Hank Paulson, running the economy rather than (essentially) a random man from Edinburgh who have never had a job in the private sector (apart from law, obv) but held a seat with a huge number of constituents working at the banks he should have been shutting down (Brown himself had never worked in the private sector at all, parachuted into a safe seat after his doctorate). Geithner nearly suffered from that same fault, but did well with TARP (again though, iirc, this was Paulson's plan).
...i am confused. Yes, we do understand why.
The UK choosing to shut down most of its native financial sector is a good example. With RBS it was particularly mad because the government ended up being a massive shareholder and then they chose to shut down all the profitable parts of the business, and double-down on the worst parts. Natwest rates franchise was probably worth £5bn, they basically shut the unit down in entirety (and a lot of those people went to large hedge funds and just went back to generating hundreds in millions in revenue) meaning that the taxpayer lost tens of billions AND the economy was knee-capped for decades.
This is taken as an example to show that even when the incentives were there, the government took a decision for nakedly political reasons. In the opposite direction, they folded HBOS into Lloyds, this was done to protect Scotland (both the PM and the Chancellor had a large number of constituents who would have lost their job if these banks were shut down...they were bailed out) and the result was Lloyds needing a bailout about one year after the banking crisis ended in the US. Again, this was sold to the public as the result of "risky casino bankers on huge bonuses"...in reality, it was just poorly paid commercial bankers lending very large amounts of money to people who couldn't ever it pay back AND politicians then making terrible choices with other people's money to boost their chances in some byelection no-one remembers.
This attitude permeates almost everything the UK does. Schools, politics first. Healthcare, politics first. Electricity, politics first.
I genuinely do not understand how anyone can't look at the scale of political intervention into the economy in the UK and not understand why this might lead to lower growth than the US. In Scotland, the government is 60% of the economy, this higher than Communist states with no legal private sector, it is an incredible number. If you look at income distribution, after-tax income under £100k is as flat or flatter than Communist states too, again this is incredible.
What is surprising is that the UK's economy is growing so quickly. The supply-side in most sectors is almost completely gone, in some economically-significant sectors you have regulators effectively managing companies, very few workers have economically useful skills because of the strong incentives in place to acquire non-economic skills...and the economy is still growing faster than most of Europe. To be fair, almost all of that immigration of low-skilled labour into the UK which is going to be absolute time-bomb financially and the rapid growth in public-sector pay has also helped consumption (even more so, the UK is running a deficit of 5% of GDP with revenues growing 4%/year in an economy that is shrinking in per capita terms...obviously, this is not sustainable)...but growth is still way higher than reason would dictate.
Comparing this to the US is not serious in any way. You have a country that prioritises growth beyond reason and are comparing that with a country which is hostile to change beyond reason. There is no possible comparison. The decisions every government since 1997 has made have been intended to reduce growth, people happily voted for this, and are now upset that the economy is shit...why?
The most concrete example is energy policy. The UK doesn't have to have the most expensive energy in the world. They chose that!
But there are many similar examples in agriculture, manufacturing, etc.
Because everything in the US is inflated thanks to rampant printing of the USD. Healthcare? Inflated. Education? Inflated. Day-to-day stuff? Inflated. Property values? Inflated.
Most of Europe has lower GDP per capita than the poorest states of the US, yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans. American growth is built on the backs of piss-poor healthcare, shoddy education and an overinflated perception of the tech sector which holds the rest of the world hostage (but not for long).
UK has higher inflation than the US, and has had so since inflation first picked up in 2022.
I think you are making broad generalizations, so broad that the only statement it's clear you're trying to make is "The US is bad" and the broadness of your argument weakens it greatly.
Cost inflation isn't unique to the United States.
Europe isn't a single country.
> yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans
Does this include the Romani people? Does this include the Ukranians being attacked by Russia?
Greece's housing cost burden is higher than 30 US states. Not all regions in the USA have faced serious property cost pressures. [1] [2]
"Day to day stuff" is a very broad category, and that includes items that are flat or decreasing in cost. In that sense I will point out that VAT is much higher in the EU than sales tax in most US states, with VAT rates of >20% being very common while the highest combined sales tax in the USA is just over 10%. Sales tax/VAT is a very regressive tax that harms the poor the most. For someone on the poor end of the spectrum in Europe, buying something like a computer or television is a greater burden than someone in the US.
I'm reminded of the natural gas price spikes in 2022 in Europe, and of how the EU's average electricity price is about 2-3x higher than it is in the US. The US has an extremely stable supply of basic needs like energy and food.
Education costs have been flat or lower than the rate of inflation in the US since roughly 2016, so for the last 10 years the idea that education is becoming more expensive in the USA has been squarely false. [3]
Healthcare, I'll give you that one, the US is not faring well. But we can look at some systems in Europe having their own difficulties like the UK and Spain and it's not like healthcare isn't a challenge elsewhere. I will also point out that the US does have public healthcare for the poorest (Medicaid) and for all people over 65 years old (Medicare), and Medicare is a standout in quality among public healthcare systems in some outcome categories.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/europes-housing-cost-burden...
[2] https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/cost...
[3] https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate
Like they can’t survive without the money from their empire? It’s hard to imagine how plundering trillions (in things, labor, etc) can lead here.
> They ran out of money, 2 world wars bankrupted them.
With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home. This is a fundamental difference with the US. I don't blame the UK for focusing at home for a while to rebuild.
> With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home.
WW2 did not 'destroy' the UK. It wasn't subjected to any of the horrors of ground warfare, and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it.
What WW2 did destroy was the UK government's ability and will to finance the sort of repression that was necessary to maintain a globe-spanning empire. Churchill in his pigheaded hubris could scream from the rooftops about India forever remaining British, but Clement wasn't going to kill people over it.
(In contrast, France lost the ability, but not the will, which is why it fought a few wars in Vietnam and Algiers, instead of letting their colonial subjects have self-rule and independence sans bloodshed.)
> and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it
c. 40,000[1]–43,000 civilians killed[2]
c. 46,000–139,000 injured[2] Two million houses damaged or destroyed (60 percent of these in London)
Sure.. Okay.. France was worse, France is also no longer a world influence it was once.
France's role in future global affairs easily eclipses the UK's. France still has a future as a great power, whereas the UK's opportunity is already squandered.
40,000 dead[1] and two million houses damaged in a country of 40 million people (presiding over a global empire of a billion souls) over six years is not meaningful... Especially in the context of the largest and most destructive war the world has ever known.
> Sure.. Okay.. France was worse,
Don't look at Metropolitan France, two thirds of it got to sit the war out as a puppet state.
Look further east. How many houses were 'damaged or destroyed' in Germany, Poland, the USSR..?
This isn't a suffering Olympics, but compared to war expenditures, the cost of rebuilding the damage inflicted to the Isles was a rounding error. Those expenditures (and their associated debts) were what crippled Britain's ability to maintain an empire, not the cost of rebuilding.
---
[1] That sort of thing was a normal day over there. A normal one - not even a bad one.
This isn't a "who had it worse"
My point is the UK decided to rebuild at home after significant damages in their capital city, and I agree with them.
A lot of EU was destroyed and had to rebuild, the US wasn't and was able to boom.
They decided to stop being a world police, and correctly so. Now we're just waiting for US to understand the same thing, which is slowly happening, finally.
Great, so every country can just smoothly descend further into tyranny with no pushback from any other country. Thankfully we won't have any world police though!
The world police was never really there to stop tyrants, the evidence is that they'd conveniently look the other way whenever they benefitted from it, and they would even put tyrants in place when it suited them. They did stop some tyrants, for sure, but only when it was convenient.
The world saw it's greatest peace under US hegemony. It wasn't perfect and there were bloody avoidable wars on the behest of the US, but by and large things ran smoothly and US sponsored globalism brought prosperity and peace to many.
During the US's period as hegemon, its influence extended only so far, and was only so often used to oppose tyranny.
> its influence extended only so far, and was only so often used to oppose tyranny
America was a major force behind post-War decolonization. It was one of our terms of the European peace.
The US provided lip service to the idea, but quickly became paranoid about the threat of world wide communism and changed its tune relatively quickly. In the places where this wasn't a factor, it wasn't altruism by any stretch, but economic interests. The US saw that a post-colonial world would be fantastic for business...
I would pick tyranny over "democracy" import any day. Neither US or UK have a great track record here.
The US is becoming even more the world police now. But now we support the wrong people too. It’s doubly bad.
Lets see what happens when the invasion of Venezuela kicks off, either the world tries to prevent yet another authoritarian government from bullying those who are already on the ground, or we'll join in on the fun I suppose, if the US feels like it wanna share the future loot.
Maybe 'World mafia' is a better description? They're not enforcing law and/or morality (nor ever have been?), they're just pressing countries for bribes for Trump, or to shift World markets for insider trades, or probably still for oil, AFAICT.
The US managed the assemble an alliance of the... let's count them:
Based on military ranking:
#5 SK, #6 UK, #7 France, #8 Japan, #9 Turkey, #10 Italy, #11 Brazil, #12 Pakistan, #14 Germany, #15 Israel, #17 Spain, #18 Australia, and if it were allowed to, #20 Ukraine.
Based on economic power: I won't even bother, only China, India, Russia aren't US allies in the top 30 or so, by GDP.
The US was a world police but it wasn't alone. Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
What the US is doing now is a tragedy that will unfold over many decades.
[1] Based on https://www.businessinsider.com/most-powerful-militaries-202... (if you have a better ranking, please link it).
> Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
This breaks down as soon as you stop looking at abstract rankings and dive into the specific logistic realities of force projection. France and to a lesser extent the UK are reasonably capable, but there's no math that adds up to anything approaching America's capabilities.
Beyond that, if you do get into the specifics of force projection (and basically anything logistical to do with NATO), you see that the entire alliance was built on the assumption that the US would contribute the capabilities that kept the whole system viable.
So,
However, This has been true from the beginning, and I don't think was a nefarious plot, or even mistake, for most of the alliance's history. The further we get from the Cold War alignments within which NATO was created, however, the more difficult it has become to sustain.'Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down' was a central tenet of NATO from its founding.
The problem is, this looks so much like a rerun of post WW1 America.
Tariffs (check - Smoot Hawley), American isolationism (check - America First), I guess we won't be far from the economic crisis (not checked yet - Great Depression).
At best, the US will slowly turn into Qing China. Unrivalled in its sphere of influence, stagnant and complacent. The US has always had a very strong anti-scientific undercurrent and a lot of it was kept in check by importing foreign elites wholesale (fairly sure the US public school system up to university level is nothing to write home about, on average). If the US turns against foreigners, most of the good ones will stop coming.
Now? No. But West Germany alone had 5000 main battle tanks in 1989. Demographics have changed, the economy has changed, but Europe could definitely project force all over the area about 1000-1500km in its vicinity if it really wanted to.
But Europeans definitely do not want that and up to a point, that's a good thing, yet Europe still needs a big enough force as a deterrent, and it currently does not have that.
>only China, India, Russia aren't US allies
Yes, all the European-aligned states you mention should currently be opposed to USA [or at least the fascist regime ruling it], because of the threats to Denmark/Greenland. UK, Aus should be particularly aligned against USA because of the threats to Canada (as part of the UK royalty's commonwealth).
Trusting the post-democracy, post-constitutional USA we find ourselves with is major folly. We might as well climb in bed with Russia.
This is something that people don’t realize. America is no longer world police. If Europeans want to resolve intra-European disputes like Russia-Ukraine we should stay out of it.
It's going to take more than 4 years of Trump for America to disappear.
Even just a few days ago congress approved $800M in funding for Ukraine.
Instead, by refusing to sell weapons to Ukraine -- and lying about Europe's support -- when it didn't suit Trump, you've firmly placed your flag. Not allies in any meaningful sense.
Why is America all of a sudden part of this? HK was a British colony, what is the UK doing to preserve freedom in HK?
The UK's having a hard enough time trying to preserve freedom in the UK.
Hold up... So you're saying that they're actually not trying to preserve freedom in the UK and have arrested hundreds of people over twitter memes?!
In all seriousness, you're approximately as free in HK as you are in the UK. In HK, don't promote democracy or insult the government in Beijing. In the UK, don't suggest that diversity isn't Our Greatest Strength.
Every society these days has an untouchable third rail. None are without beams in their own eyes.
The discussion has devolved to such a point that people from outside the UK keep parroting this (likely Kremlin originated) line that the UK is now a Muslim stronghold with no free speech when in reality it just continues to uphold the values it has influenced the world with, one of the few positives from its dark past, of protecting those unable to protect themselves. Hate speech and punching down. As if inciting violence is completely harmless and no bad ever comes of it.
Many freedom-focused people without direct experience of disability, bullying or discrimination have no way to relate to that concept, and the echo chamber amplifies the intellectually dishonest takes until they take hold. Which is exactly what the angry, seething, downtrodden richest people in the world seem to want right now. I wonder why. What a sorry, hopeless state we've allowed to happen. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, sure, but the ones who've worked hardest to develop theirs should be weighted the most. Now a Russian bot has the same value on a platform as a nuclear scientist or, dare I say it, a real journalist. Because it's entertaining and tickles some dangling dopamine receptors. I'm sure people will wind their necks in when the ultimate result has finally played out and we'll cycle back to cooler heads prevailing, but I fear we'll have to go there first before we get back.
Yes I took the bait, but no regrets, I'll die on this hill. Hate bullies and liars with a passion.
> protecting those unable to protect themselves. Hate speech and punching down.
Yeah, you're talking about speech controls. But, surely, yours are noble and theirs are ignoble.
The definition of "hate speech" over there is very broad, and "punching down" is a questionable concept to begin with.
"Most of it is a lie that they tell their own citizens, though, as America and the West only want democracy and promote it for their own ends. They destroy any democracy that might not align with their worldview or serve their interests.
The current administration is overtly doing what was previously done covertly. Dictators are acceptable as long as it is politically convenient. One of the most recent cases is Pakistan, where the army has taken over, and EU and Commonwealth election monitors did not issue even election monitor report even after two years. Instead, they have facilitated the murder and killing of Pakistani civilians. But maybe Pakistanis are brown-skinned, so for them, democracy is not allowed.
Pakistan should be under sanctions, but it is not, as it is providing ammunition for Ukraine. That is the biggest problem of the West: their hypocrisy. They are calling for democracy in Hong Kong, as that serves their own agendas, but will say nothing about an apartheid state like Israel."
"Imran Khan, the former prime minister, has been jailed without trial for the last two-plus years and has been kept in solitary confinement for months out of those. How many newspapers mention it in the West or make it a news topic? But this Hong Kong (HK) Jimmy Lai conviction will be the headlines in most of the Western media a clear example of propaganda to rile up the population against China and socialism.
This is why I laugh when people here on Hacker News mention China's control of media and its propaganda, when the Western media is no better than them. At least many Chinese citizens know they are being propagandized against and can filter it out."
> when the Western media is no better than them
better is a continuum across many dimensions. Therefore when you say "no better than" you're saying "worse than".
I'm not saying Western media is good, but it's really hard to argue that it's worse than the Chinese media, given the headline story above and our freedom to discuss it here and elsewhere.
Both can be bad, but one is more bad than the other.
Sure but this was prompted by the absurdly self-congratulatory "city on a hill" comment which shows how out of touch the West is with critical thought from the global south.
You're misreading the original comment.
As originally used, the city on a hill comment was about aspirations, not achievements. IOW, the US was aspiring to be the city on the hill, not that it was.
And then JumpCrissCross's comment says that the US has stopped even aspiring to be the city on the hill.
It's a comment saying the US has fallen. How is that absurdly self-congratulatory?
Why are your comments in double quotes?
The human condition is hypocrisy. The weak want fairness. The powerful want their power unbridled. Only anomalous humans can be powerful without abusing that power.
Can you imagine a Chinese person writing like you just did on Weibo?
Democracy/liberalism/civil liberties etc. isn't 100% or not at all.
That reminds me of an old cold war joke. In China you are free to criticise western governments on Weibo. What is the problem?
This feels very dismissive. The comment you responded is about the very real killing of a lot of people and your response is "at least we can talk about it?"
Being free to talk about the horrible things happening doesn't appear to stop them from happening so what exactly is your point here?
Exactly right. And what's more, I think this is cynically exploited by apologists who want to defend evil by resorting to whataboutisms. State sponsored troll farms are real and the market for buying and selling, and mobilizing accounts is increasingly mature. And even, dare I say, strategically and intellectually sophisticated in some ways while simultaneously being intellectually and ethically bankrupt.
But I actually don't think it's that hard to understand that (1) the US has significantly compromised moral authority, but also (2) China bad and (3) there's important differences of scale of moral offense depending on what you are talking about. You can land a perfectly coherent point about, say, China's hostile takeover of Hong Kong being bad, it's military ramp up to seize Taiwan by 2027 being bad. But too often, I think bad faith actors will intentionally exploit the complexity to try and muddy the waters, and the only reason it seems like it's hard to articulate the distinction online is because of motivated performances.
Of course there Poe's law element too, which is that you should never underestimate the ability of people online becoming confused about politically charged topics, but in this case I think it's a bit of column a, a bit of column b synergistically amplifying one another.
Not everything is about Trump!
Evil? Rooting out traitors and compradors is evil now?
I guess it is, since it goes against American interests. I don't really know why everyone is crying for him, he knew exactly who he was playing for.
By “calling out” you mean invading, or what, exactly? And haven’t you guys had enough of fighting “evil” while causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians? See Iraq.
Assuming that somebody is implying something as insane as an invasion of China when they say something as mellow as "call out" is certainly.. a take.
So then what use is any other approach than simply letting it happen? Words are just that. If violence is out, then the only other approach is escalating the trade war and Chinese isolation, at great cost.
If your only plan is invading China, you don't have a plan.
Obviously not.
As in the 20th century, it means to cultivate moral, and thereby political, opposition to imprisoning activists.
It’s a soft power the US has gradually lost.
In the "good old days" it was like that:
"The colonial government used the Control of Publications Consolidation Ordinance (1951) to regulate publications and suppress freedom of the press. One notable case resulted in the suppression of the newspaper Ta Kung Pao for six months (later reduced to 12 days) for its criticism of the colonial government's deportation of the Federation of Trade Unions-backed fire relief organisation officials and use of live fire against protestors. Deportation was also used as a method to control politics in education. Lo Tong, a principal at a pro-Beijing, patriotic middle school, had been deported in 1950 for raising the People's Republic of China (PRC) flag and singing the national anthem at his school." [1]
Now of course we'd all prefer Western-style freedoms but the narrative on HK is highly skewed and hypocritical, with HK used as a pawn in the broader anti-China narrative.
Even Singapore isn't exactly rosy but it is a friend of the West so it's fine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Hong_Kong
People often forget that democratization and free press came to HK very late, close to the end of the land lease.
America was on the decline for a while already. Look at how forgotten Tibet is. Why would HK be any different when a treaty was signed to hand it over? It’s more official than Tibet which was just annexed through force. Although it’s worth remembering that China has violated the terms of the HK treaty as well.
Also as a reminder, back in 1993 Richard Gere was banned from the Oscars for 20 years for advocating for Tibet (https://www.foxnews.com/media/richard-gere-speaks-out-nearly...). American institutions have been declining/corrupted for a lot longer than the current administration.
Tibet is clear-cut annexation of a sovereign country. HK / New Territories was only leased, and it wasn't going to be practical to keep it longer. The problem is that Beijing no longer needed HK as a gateway, the US/EU had already embraced going directly to the mainland to do deals by the early 2000s. The HK I knew was already gone by 2014.
> America was on the decline for a while already. Look at how forgotten Tibet is.
First, look how forgotten Puerto Rico is.
Why is this evil? Most countries draw the line at aiding and abetting foreign harm to your own country, no matter how justified. I would expect no different if it happened in America or Europe.
> Most countries draw the line at aiding and abetting foreign harm to your own country, no matter how justified
On the books maybe. But for instance, America defines treason so narrowly that nobody has been convicted of it since WW2. Americans are free to sing praise of China, Russia, North Korea, whoever they like no matter how unjustified. Unless Congress has declared a war, which hasn't happened since WW2, you can talk as much smack about America or praise opposing regimes as much as you like.
If you start a website that is too friendly to a foreign regime, it risks being shut down by the FBI. That’s what happened to the American Heritage Tribune. The US power nexus absolutely suppresses dissident speech, whether through lawsuits, deplatforming, de-banking, or any of a variety of other means.
It doesn’t matter if its called Treason, for example the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage. Aiding and abetting what the US saw was foreign harm.
Not just any espionage.
They gave the Soviets the atomic bomb designs, permanently changing the global power balance!
The Soviets would have developed the atomic bomb (and eventually the hydrogen bomb). This simply accelerated their development. And considering that for the first decade after the end of WW2 the US considered and threatened the USSR with nuclear annihilation frequently, this is probably a good development...
Soviet under Stalin was just as bad as Germany under Hitler.
The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2 and the post war world would have been a much better place, including a non communist China. That's my guess at least. Impossible to know, of course.
In reality, the Rosenberg documents wasn't very decisive. Stalin already had the Manhattan Project blueprints from Klaus Fuchs.
I share your take on the Soviets, but,
> The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2
This is dubious, for several reasons: Public sentiment, starting another major war immediately after they thought they'd catch a break from war for a while. The premise of America building enough nukes to actually get the Soviets on their knees instead of provoking them to steamroll the rest of Europe instead. The ability of American forces, in the late 40s and early 50s, to get nuclear armed bombers over the appropriate targets in Russia.
Japan was already defeated, and two bombs proved enough to make them admit it. That context doesn't hold true for the Soviets; they may well have tanked several bombs to major cities then proceeded to fight a conventional war instead of surrender.
It's fascinating to read how few nuclear bombs we actually had until the 1950's. There was real concern that we would need more than two for Japan, and really had none ready after Fat Man and Little Boy were expended.
Almost as fascinating is how often in the late 40's and early 50's we threatened the USSR with nuclear weapons. Don't leave Iran quickly enough? We'll blast you. Amazing and scary how the world has survived so far...
Stalin was undoubtedly evil with the blood of millions on his hands.
I don't think that the West had any chance to liberate the Soviet bloc (I'm assuming what you meant is the Warsaw Pact countries). The Red Army was simply too big, too powerful, and too experienced at the end of WW2. Even using the few atomic bombs available between 1945-1949 (when the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon), the USSR was just too big a country, with too many people.
And if you look at the willingness to take casualties that the Red Army demonstrated while fighting the Nazis, trying to take on the USSR would have been folly.
The West was spent after WW2 (as were the Soviets), with no appetite for further conflict. Even the US was tired of war, and only the drumbeat against the Red Menace did much to motivate the populace.
Yeah, that's about it. General Patton, John von Neuman were among those advocating for it, and in hindsight I think it would have been a good thing to avoid the Cold War and the communist era, saving China from the horrific Mao era, etc.
But I agree that turning on an ally, sacrificing millions more of your soldiers etc at that point would have been a very hard sell. I'm sure I would have been opposed to it at the time.
Of course avoiding the Cold War would have been beneficial to humanity, but it wasn't realistic considering the state of the world at the time.
As far as I can tell, the prosecution's entire case relies on an unfounded grand conspiracy argument. That by running a newspaper which supported democracy, Lai was implicitly calling on the US to impose sanctions on China.
Lai admitted to explicitly doing this - https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/32... - I believe he said he did this on multiple occasions. His arguments make no sense at all because, given his background, the only possible interpretation of that course of action would be to use sanctions to change the government.
Also, if Lai genuinely believed (as I think he must have done) that the US was going to help in any way then he was delusional. In almost every case, "freedom" fighters end up relying on the resources of hostile foreign governments to continue their activities. There is no way that the US was going to offer anything other than a publicity stunt.
never was
it was always BS
now everybody can see
thats the only difference
The aspiration was always BS? I think we have fairly concrete historical records showing the opposite.
That this is the top comment says all you need to know about this board.
Being a city on the hill is a cudgel, not a halo. It’s always been used in a self-serving way, and always against enemies.
Who is someone who points out the flaws of their enemies but never the flaws of themselves or their friends, even though they are all equally likely to commit the same crimes?[1] That is a scoundrel. Not someone that anyone needs to wait to Call Out anyone on anything.
That it is (in this context) a self-admitted “aspiration” is the laughable part. No one else gets credit for “aspiring” (just words) to be a city on a hill. Except if it’s us.
[1] Being generous here.
every president who ever invoked the "city on a hill" metaphor was simultaneously responsible for acts of unprecedented evil in foreign countries; from JFK in southeast asia, to reagan in the middle east and central america, to obama's drone strikes in the middle east.
Oh yes, I'm sure we all can easily enumerate the times America has effectively called out the "evil abroad." And such instances have all indeed survived the scrutiny of history/retrospection no less!
You’re literally just restating OPs point but with heavy sarcasm.
Yep! It's meant to indicate the absurdity of the point. Probably not my best form, but for a state that murdered literally millions of people the first two decades of this millennium, I would of hoped the intent would have been more obvious here.
It's not our aspirations that we've lost.
It's the entrenchment of a particular kind of parasitic elite.
The logic that made them into "elites" has turned in on itself and is now self-cannibalizing.
The saving grace is only the capacity for the American people to see through this, but with the derangement of information pathways we're increasingly at the behest of these people and their narratives that only serve their aggrandizement.
All the talk about "saving the west" or "individualism" or the some other talk of spirit that these preachers sermon about, is only to serve themselves and no one else.
"Calling out evil" is another one of those victims to their self-serving motivations. Along with "climate change", "environmentalism", "democracy", "freedom", or a whole host of otherwise genuinely noble causes.
Democracy that we knew from 60s to 00s is effectively dead everywhere. I would like to think that social media and surveillance technology both played roles in accomplishing that so quickly and without public outcry/protests. All that blood spilled in 1900s to spread democracy wiped out in a matter of couple of years.
The Heritage Foundation has been operating since 70s. They've played the long game, and it's only now that we are, en masse, looking at the culmination of decades of work by them and thinking, "wow, that was quick!".
> both played roles in accomplishing that so quickly and without public outcry/protests.
Bread and circuses. Everyone is comfortable and entertained to the point of drooling. They won't be leaving their cozy warm houses with TV and video games to do anything. Brain isn't built that way. If it were, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. It'll always be short-term rewards over long-term most of the time for most people.
On the other hand, none of this is sustainable in the long-run, so it'll all come crashing down and things will work out. We'll probably be dead long before then though. Gotta go through some rough shit first.
It never existed in the first place. You just were unable to see the machinations behind the scenes when all of media was a newspaper and 3 TV stations.
I've found the most freedom on the fringes of the earth. Rural South America and Kurdish Syria to name a couple.
Anywhere with any real government though, it's dead. My theory is the period of classical liberalism in the world was largely a result of the brief period where firearms were the main form of warfare, which represented a short period in history where violence was most decentralized and the government had the least leverage. Before that it was years to train archers or swordsman, after that fighter jets/ missiles / technology tilted back in power of government. In the golden era of the age of the firearm one person was basically one vote of violence (giving the populace the greater leverage); whereas before/after that time each vote was heavily weighted by a government actor.
Can you elaborate on that? Sounds really interesting.
I grew up in a place you could call “rural South America” (specifically in a rural border town between Brazil and Uruguay) and at the time didn’t feel free there, but these days there’s a lot I think I could appreciate about the place if I were to go back (I’ve been living in the US for the past 13 years).
Reading the parent comment, I assume their use of 'freedom' more closely aligns with being undisturbed by a government.
It's a very common usage in America, focusing on "Freedom from X" rather than "Freedom to do Y", the latter of which often needs some sort of societal protection, most often provided by said government.
"Democracy that we knew from 60s to 00s is effectively dead everywhere."
What if it was a fake all along and was just a facade and social media exposed it?
It was, but what we have no is also much worse. Both can be true.
Interestingly, places that used to be shit holes are becoming better or at least show a desire for becoming better. For example in eastern Europe, there are movements that demands democracy and destruction of the establishment.
So if all the world is against the establishment, it only makes sense that shit holes become better places and better place become shit holes.
That's it I suspect that these moments can be quite fragile. Turkey was crashed, Georgia was crashed, Belarus was crashed, Russia was crashed, Ukraine is fighting generational war, Serbia is teetering, Bulgaria is on to something but its only a spark ATM. However, the crashed ones also did not stabilize, they just become brutal and visibly oppressed and IMHO anything still can happen.
The anglosphere is not the entire democratic world.
Agreed but even in places like South Korea where they staged national weekend strikes to remove a sitting president, it’s withering away. People are tired of politics and politicians. It’s death by apathy.
Democracy died in 1989-1991. We've been riding on the fumes since then.
Why do you say it is at that time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989
How did what you linked to (i.e. the fall of Communism) contribute to decline of democracy anywhere?
when evil dies, the need to pretend to be good in the face of it, dies as well.
I tend to believe that Communism provided enough of a threat to the Western elites that they felt forced to keep their countries visibly better. Not ready to defend this argument right now, I just think it does hold water.
There's a very common line of thinking that goes like this:
From the end of WWII until the fall of communism, the public in the West (as opposed to the elites) enjoyed much better treatment, and prospered more than ever before or since. This would include both fiscal gains, and the public's opinion being truly taken into consideration. This is mainly because the elites were afraid of people turning socialist / communist, so they gave them a reason to actually be invested in the system. Once that threat of communism evaporated, the elites could proceed to gut the majority as in the previous centuries with no fear whatsoever.
My comments:
I'm not sure I agree with that, though, too simplistic. On the other hand, I also think that people have a rose-tinted view of what "democracy" always was - with enough money / media control and a bit of time, you can convince the majority of anything, anywhere. Letting people prosper does make it easier. Maybe it did play a bit of a role. A counter argument is that (independent) media coverage made the Vietnam war unpopular, and then the US pulled out because of that, a miracle of democracy which never really came close to happening again ever after.
But I think the USSR itself murdered any real chances of communism's further spread in 1968, when they invaded Czechoslovakia. (The Hungarian thing in 1956 isn't nearly as important because of country's undeniable previous Axis affiliation; few had sympathy for that back then). The US and west in general couldn't get rid of their Woody Guthries, and their Klaus Fuchses, until USSR did it for them through sheer idiocy. But after that, was communism really a threat?
But I do think that the 1950s policies were affected by the war (+ Korean war) even more than communism itself. All these traumatized vets, desensitized to violence, were now back home, and the elites were truly afraid. But that doesn't seem like it brought democracy in today's sense of the word? There's a reason why feminism regressed in the 50s - letting men be little despots in their own (cheaply bought) homes was the least the government could do. But that seems to have lasted only until the mid 60s, then the Vietnam thing happened, ... Let's not go further.
Most left wing movements and organisations in the West drew strength from the existence of strong socialist states, both materially and ideologically. These kinds of groups were a balancing force against the right wing/capitalist direction, which is inherently undemocratic, having as its logical endpoint the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
I think the true decline begun earlier though, around the Thatcher-Reagan era, with the erosion of all kinds of state ownership and control of our economy and broad attacks on organised labour.
Is quite an assumption to make left wing movements and organizations in the West the defender of democracy. And another assumption to make the right movements the enemy of democracy. Also, take it from me who lived 15 years in communist Romania - the socialist states were very weak relative to the West.
Concentration of wealth and power was (and is) the highest in communist dictatorships - literally a handful (i.e. less than 5) people control pretty much everything in Cuba. North Korea is ruled with an iron fist by 1 guy - that is some concentration of power, right? In Communist Romania / East Germany power was concentrated in 2 people (a couple). In USSR power was concentrated in the 7 members of PolitBuro. In China power used to be concentrated in the hands of Mao Zhedong, now it seems it is concentrated in the hands of Xi Ping (but I could be wrong about Xi Ping. Maybe he shares some power with other people). I could go on forever, baby!!!
Capitalism has its problems but capitalism is quite fine all kinds of political systems - see German capitalism before, during, and following Hitler's rule.
Unregulated Capitalism is just as bad as autocratic "socialism". It just has more steps.
Concentrations of power seem bad, regardless of the mechanisms that do the concentrating.
no, social media did not kill it :facepalm:
mass de-regulation, tax avoidance, effective end of anti-trust killed it
social media was just the tool-of-the-day to break democracy
I agree. I also challenge readers to watch TV broadcasts from politicians speaking in 70s, 80s and even 90s. You won't even believe your ears. But, the slow takeover of the world by international conglomerates buying up everything else, merging and bankrupting competition just doesn't seem to be on anyones mind with any power to deal with it. An acquaintance works at one of these Frankensteins monsters and there is a hodge podge of internal systems. It's hard to believe how many companies they have bought up over the decades.
"There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime."
- Network (1976)
> The law was enacted without consulting the Hong Kong legislature and gave authorities broad powers to charge and jail people they deemed a threat to the city's law and order, or the government's stability.
The UK throwing a very big rock at a thin glass house.
I don’t agree with any such laws in any country, but I think it’s important to point out the hypocrisy here
When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”
Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.
If you find this line of argumentation compelling there’s no discussing anything with you.
You can easily call out way more recent stuff such as what's happening in central America right now with Colombia and Venezuela.
Sinking half a dozen ships in international waters is a crime.
Sanity would ask for intercepting those boats in your waters, and that's it, controlling what's in them, who are these people and send them in front of a court if they breached your law, on your soil (or waters).
Yet we are at the point nobody raises the voice where sinking civilian ships on the basis it's drug smugglers (without providing a proof, let alone the fact that even if it was true it's still insane) has any leftover of decency or justice.
Or calling for the annexation of Greenland and Panama by any means.
Or bombing Iran on the basis that it's developing nuclear weapons on behalf of the Israeli government (which is an act of war if Iran could wage it, the US does not get to decide who can have a nuclear weapon and who does not).
The list of breaches in decency or law is basically infinite.
As much as I agree with you. Iran is signatory of the NPT with all its consequences.
Instead of letting more countries develop these weapons, we should work on denuclearizing all countries, starting with the US and Russia and their insane arsenals! And maybe build a unified international legal framework for civilian nuclear developments and applications from energy to medical outside of the "security council's" ferule!
A nuclear war cannot be won, thus never fought!
There's a very precise protocol when a signatory of the NPT is suspected of breaching it: first it has to go through the IAEA which has to be able to inspect whatever site, then it gets escalated to the UN, then a decision is taken, at the UN level on the matter.
Not unilaterally by Israel calling the world's superpower for help.
Your logic is as sound as "since my neighbor makes something illegal at home, I'm gonna shoot him and then call my buddy sheriff for help". It is obviously illegal.
Well I never advocated the latter, so please. And my logic is very sound, better than yours. :)
I was replying to "the US does not get to decide who can have a nuclear weapon and who does not". As much as I agree with that... my previous comment.
We're not talking about a nuclear program.
You're not wrong, but I just wanted to point out that this level of arbitrary executive behavior and blatant massive government corruption is pretty new to us (the many millions of decent US citizens who are appalled at it), and we're still trying to figure out what the heck we can do about it. So at least for now I really hope it's valid to ascribe this just to the current administration, not assume the US will stay like this.
> Sinking half a dozen ships in international waters is a crime.
Citation needed.
This isn't about things that happened decades or centuries ago though. It's about how right now, today, the UK is arresting 12,000 people a year, 30 a day, for supposedly "offensive" posts on social media.
https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...
As your own article points out that stuff has been on the statute books for years (covering stuff which is generally illegal everywhere like death threats as well as stuff which was merely allegedly sent to cause others distress or anxiety) and convictions actually fell between 2015 and 2023. For all its much vaunted constitutional protections, the United States has also arrested a whole bunch of people for vague and difficult to call a crime stuff like Charlie Kirk memes or (nuanced or otherwise) criticisms of Israeli policy recently as well as more obviously menacing stuff that happened to take the form of social media communication.
Neither are quite the same thing as railroading a government critic for "sedition"
The current UK government has arrested over 2000 people for holding signs on charges of terrorism, and is currently in the process of abolishing jury trials. This isn't about history.
The UK is also not a single person, but a collection of millions of individuals and diverse groups with diverse opinions and actions.
This is what they want. Everyone gasping at their actions but uninformed on what to do about it.
My point is that a country may do reprehensible things, but that does not mean that the people in that country approve of those things -- or even that the people in government approve of them. Countries can be complex, with many contradictions, opinions, and opposing forces.
Your examples are a bit weasely because they happened long ago, and so seem sillier. What I assumed was meant here is that, currently, the UK government is out to punish wrongthink.
> When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”.
What's the solution? The alternative, where we can't criticize our governments on account of their hypocrisies and imperfections, robs citizens of their check against an institution with a monopoly on violence.
> Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.
There's certainly a difference between holding countries responsible for events that have long since ceased and holding a government responsible for double standards practiced presently. The UK lacks credibility on Hong Kong when its own citizens are being jailed on the basis of overbroad hate speech regulations and when its government agencies attempt to claim extraterritorial jurisdiction over the operation of foreign social media companies. Westminister can't be so empty-headed as to believe that its actions will go unnoticed by other governments.
It goes beyond just pointing out hypocrisy. This is a well known propaganda strategy called "Whataboutism." [1] It's unfortunately a tremendously effective smokescreen that divides the audience and shuts down meaningful debate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
There is some nuance, because I’ve also seen genuine discussion falsely labeled as whataboutism.
If the point in bringing up the hypocrisy is to end or distract the discussion, it is whataboutism. However, if the point is to compare two instances of a thing to make a point it’s fair game imo.
I don't see slavery as an albatross. If anything, America accelerated its demise by its abolition at home --where America wasn't even the biggest enslaver of people; Brazil, The British empire (Caribbean), France (colonies), Russia (serfs), had way, way more slaves than the US. Today, India, China, Horn of Africa, NK have large slave populations.
Is it whatboutism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
>When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”
There is nothing logically wrong with hypocrisy. I tell my toddlers not to do stuff I do all the time.
The problem with hypocrisy comes when one party is assumed to have more rights than the other. In this case, why would Britain (or the US's) government be allowed to be more corrupt than China's?
I assume Britain is brought up due to the British government's historic role in Hong Kong and China.
The British have a clear connection to Hong Kong. And they're right. And their rule would be freer.
Even bad people can be correct. Evaluate every claim on its merits, as opposed to its speaker. Only when you get down to resolving ambiguities is the evaluation of the speaker necessary.
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
-@dril, 2014
Sigh, you know the UKs laws are much more complicated than right wing media in the US will explain to you.
I don't think that's really true and I live here. People are convicted for saying 'rude' things online all the time, even if some of those stories are also hyped up in the news. Attempting to backdoor/otherwise break e2e encryption... also literally the case. I'm not sure where you think the nuance is.
You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred. Nobody is allowed to shout fire in crowded theatre. Nobody has been convicted for saying something rude.
With relation to the article + Grand parent, the government first of all does not write on behalf of the BBC and in fact both Labour and Conservatives especially have had massive problems with its editorial decisions.
The ideal the you cannot criticise the government in the UK and that our laws here are similar to the ones in HK is honestly not a fair parallel at all.
I think the government are extremely naive and the security services try to push them into extremely stupid decisions on encryption.
> You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred.
I don't think that's a fair characterisation. Recently we've convicted:
Are these really meeting your bar for inciting violence and/or hatred? At a level might warrant imprisonment? For me, these things are not even borderline; they are well into legitimate free speech territory and the government shouldn't be trying its best to stifle them.And those are just successful convictions, not initiated prosecutions, or the wider chilling effects of it all.
Even if what you said were true, those two things are largely legal in the US, so I wouldn't really say it's their tabloids over-hyping it as much as they legitimately find the actual standards here questionable.
Haha - you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says. Donald Trump has also made flag burning a crime. So it's not as if the US is a champion of free speech anymore.
I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was deliberately trying to antagonise and abuse people upset which yes is illegal here. He could have easily made any points he wanted without abusing people. Note that he was given a suspended sentence in the hope that he would stop abusing people and has served no jail time as yet. Seems like a sensible decision.
The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about abuse online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04vqldn42go
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9v4e0z9r8o
> you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says.
Does this matter? The question is whether the UK has a moral authority to tell China off over free speech. Nobody has said that different countries don't have varying types of restrictions on speech.
Even if I agreed with your characterisation of the US, you're talking about visitors, not residents or citizens. The UK also regularly denies visas for speech.
You're defending against whataboutism from China to the UK by invoking whataboutism from the UK to the US here.
> I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was harassing people online which yes is illegal here.
No, harassment is a specific and different offence. He was convicted specifically for sending 'grossly offensive' messages, not harassing people. The definition of that crime is based on the content of the messages, not the pattern of their transmission.
> The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
I don't really get how this refutes anything I've said. It's illegal to protest in this manner in the UK.
What is your argument here, that OK it's illegal but the punishment is not very severe so no problem? You understand that the specifics of _what_ is illegal is the criticism.
> Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about harassment online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
Neither of these is about harassment. Or they would have been convicted of harassment.
None of these laws limit your freedom of speech do they - you can perfectly well say you think that a TV presenter is incompetent without being arrested - it's the abuse that is the problem here. If your style of communication involves burning religious texts you must have very big mental health issues so I'm sorry for that.
> None of these laws limit your freedom of speech do they
Of course they do? Think we've descended into absurdity here if that's the claim.
Suffice to say, the Chinese response to Jimmy Lai would be along the lines of "well of course he has free speech, if only he did it in a completely different way that was acceptable to my sensibilities".
So what would you like to say specifically that would be stopped by these laws?
I'd like the right to burn any religious text I please, and to call someone a 'diversity hire', if those were my feelings. I thought that was clear from me using them as examples.
Crticisim of religion, through symbolic speech, is pretty classically part and parcel of the tenets of free speech. It's hardly some fringe belief.
Even if you think calling someone a 'diversity hire' is often untrue, or often racist, or some such thing, there are surely some cases where it is true or a legitimate criticism of hiring policy. Should we not be able to claim as much? On peril of imprisonment?
I don't think your views on this are particularly uncommon. It's just that British people don't have a history of wrestling with free speech, or its importance. Tone policing is a thought-terminating cliche in the UK.
On sentencing, Judge Menary KC told Barton: "Robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.
"But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.
"As the jury concluded, your offences exemplify behaviour that is beyond this limit – amounting to a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful."
Seems like you're just lying with the 'diversity hire' content of Barton's posts aren't you?
Well feel free to roll all those in to what I'd like the right to say. I'm going with the most outlandish thing (to me) that he was convicted on, because by definition even without the other things you've now quoted, the 'diversity hire' comment in and of itself was found to be illegal. Thus it's illegal to say for anyone, even if they don't also call someone a 'bike nonce' or photoshop them onto unsavoury images.
None of this meets the bar for me, and ironically would not be illegal in China or the US, to address the original point.
And yet, none of that has anything to do with the conviction of Jimmy Lai.
Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism? Who cares what the UK does when the subject is HK's obvious slide in to naked authoritarianism.
Can we not simply condemn that?
Because once upon a time it was with pride you could point out all the ways your democracy was different than “theirs”.
Now you’re just condemning what you’ve already done. Why should anyone respect it? At some point you loose respect and eventually you just look confused.
So you support China's actions because UK also bad?
questioning someone's moral authority isnt equivalent to supporting his opponent.
Whenever one 'side' makes a statement about the other it's often dripped in some kind of righteous indignation or other moralistic tone, so it's hard not to descend into whataboutism in those cases. The Chinese, of course, do this too, just with their own ideology baked in.
Why shouldn’t it boil down to “whataboutism”, aka comparison and putting things into context? Especially during UK’s obvious slide in to disguised authoritarianism.
One can also ask how HK ended up with English language and common law in the first place… though that wasn’t so recent.
> Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism?
Unfortunately, just like whataboutism can be a disingenuous rhetorical device, so is anti-whataboutism. Sometimes the comparison is relevant, sometimes it's not. In this case, I think it is.
Great Britain is very directly involved in a whole bunch of relatively recent messes in the Middle East, China, etc.
It's not whataboutism to point up the current messed up situation is not unrelated to the behavior of the UK, and their fingerprints are all over it. Of course things aren't static and new actors have changed the conversation, but this doesn't absolve them and they shouldn't be pointing fingers.
What on earth are you talking about? The UK has just done whatever the US wanted for about 40 years or more.
If you’re saying historically as an imperial power we’ve done terrible stuff we can all agree with that!
Yes to both things.
Since it fell from power, the UK does everything the US wants.
However, historically it set up a lot of bad things that happened in the Middle East, China, Africa, etc. The UK cannot untangle itself from it, "it's all in the past", because history is terribly influenced by things in the past, by definition.
So do you think citizens of the UK should be held accountable somehow? I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
The citizens of the UK in general? No.
Authorities and government? Yes. Even if the current ones weren't born when history was made, it's their duty to understand the history of the country they are governing, and of how past decisions shaped the world as it currently is.
> I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
The history of Hong Kong itself is deeply influenced by Great Britain's actions (as well as other world powers, of course), and it doesn't start with mainland China's takeover.
Another example of UK's actions deeply influencing the current world, unrelated to China, is Iran (and well, the Middle East in general). So the UK cannot simply point fingers at others and forget about how they helped shape the situation.
> let him who is without sin cast the first stone
And all that. We're all evil at one point or another, from someone's perspective.
This is crazy logic. It leaves no one with the ability to critique another country when it abuses its citizens.
No, that's not the right takeaway, at least for me. For me it means that even if a country isn't perfect, doesn't automatically mean they can't be against others doing harm.
It really is crazy. A lot of people here seem to miss the relative nature of countries' behavior and think they're all as bad as each other when the difference is huge.
Especially when it comes to China and Russia, people seem to think they're about as bad as the West when nothing could be further from the truth.
Maybe thats due to more people from the hard right haunting this place, or the general shift of the tech crowd to the right. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
Really? In my perception, the "US is evil so it can't criticize anyone else" more often came from the left.
I agree, I should have included the hard left which tend to be apologists for China and Russia.
I'm sorry, but "calling out apparent injustice" is not comparable to "literally throwing the first rock to stone someone to death".
That quote gets bent very far out of context. You could use it to justify any inaction under that interpretation, on the theory that you are not qualified to take it simply due to being imperfect.
> rock to stone someone to death
Not sure where you get this from?
For me it means even "evil" people/countries can raise valid points, nothing more, nothing less.
That phrase originated from a story in which a lapsed carpenter stopped an execution.
Christ, we need more woodworking classes for kids on the tech path.
Right, but you do realize that sentences can mean more than just the literal meaning it historically had?
Christ, we really need reading comprehension classes and ideally poetry classes or something similar, since people are unable to read more than the actual characters today it seems... Seems extra problematic in software/programming circles, maybe we need to add arts classes to science programs too?
If you wanted to reference the saying about people living in glass houses throwing stones, you should have referenced that one rather than a different quote about stones. They're not equivalent.
> If you wanted to reference the saying about people living in glass houses throwing stones
Well, I didn't, I referenced exactly what I wanted to reference. It's OK to go back into the cave now.
In fact they are referencing the phrase, of much later origin, "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".
embedding-shape is quoting Jesus, who was in fact literally referring to killing people by throwing stones. (And, in fact, was talking to a mob that was literally about to do exactly that.)
I'm thoroughly familiar with Jesus's words. By "they" I was referring to demarq, who I believe embedding-shape was misinterpreting.
Ah, I see.
If anything, these actions will make Taiwan even more opposed to unification with China and will strengthen their resolve to oppose China.
For China it would have made more sense long term to first "incorporate" Taiwan into their country and only after that start turning the screws on both Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Naw, now Taiwan will have a few years to realize being 1C2S is no big deal, kids in HK are going to mainland to party, next gen is going to be even more integrated thanks to patriotic education. In 5-10 years you'll have patriotic HKers lol at TWers being brained for for prefering Gaza solution over HK solution. Which realisitically is really what the offer is now.
The Taiwanese support for pro-independence actually skyrocketed in 2019. I don't think anything bad happening to Hong Kong activists would be a good look for China.
https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/upload/44/doc/6963/Tondu202506.png
Yes in 2019, look what's happening to TW politics now, green fatigue, DPP anti PRC rhetoric secured a couple elections but now the island new gen is increasingly jaded and post political because they realize the DPP Anti PRC card isn't improving their QoL. VS a few years post getting crushed, HKers also post political who realized they can simply live much better lives by embracing mainland (SZ) and not be such nativist/supremecist. Reality is democratic and shitlib politics is structurally failling everywhere, if the authoritarian gives you a priveledged deal, many TWer might eventually take it. Just look at HK reaction to recent fire, HKers lamenting how much more SZ and mainland tier1s have their shit together. The vibe is changing. PRC needs carrot and stick for TW, like how it's always been. Let's be real, in a post TW crisis there will be winners and losers, TWers need to see how winners are treated (tier1 affordtable life style) and how losers are treated (Gaza). Nevermind DPP just banned XHS because they realize they're losing culture war to mainland.
The bubble is strong with this one...
I am still waiting for the widely advertised and announced China attack on Taiwan.
And I do not think Taiwan will become Gaza if China eventually attacks - unlike Israel, China has quite a lot of enemies in the West.
A lot of those "enemies" can't protect Ukraine which they are much more geographically positioned to defend.
Plus a lot of morals go out of the window when there is a real threat and a lot on the line. Even between the new tensions with China and Japan, the US appears to be quiet: https://www.ft.com/content/bf8b5def-db4d-43ac-91cf-bea5fcfa3...
The West would probably cut economic ties with China like they cut them with Russia. For the simple reason that economic ties would help their enemy.
Invadin Taiwan would have a huge negative impact in China. Another poster in this thread, in the process of contradicting himself, said that the longer PRC waits the stronger they become. The conclusion then being that the best course of action for China is to never invade Taiwan. I fully subscribe to this conclusion.
lol it's not contradictory, there are specific PRC strategic milestones that shifts TW scenario, or a broader push to boot US+co out of east asia and gain PRC asian hegemony from potential gamble to forgone. And that's what PRC ultimately wants, their own Monroe. There's a few components left that more or less secures this in next 10/20 years where balance of forces makes US posture existentially unfavorable. The intersection period is mid 2030s-2040s where basically broader strategic balance is baked in, it's just matter of watching relevant trend lines cross (or gap extend). Realistically that's when we can expect things to pop off. The best course of action is for PRC to NOT JUST INVADE TW, but use TW as cassus belli for broader east asian war with US+co to dismantal postwar hemisphereic US security archictecture. The conclusion is, TW is basically PRC's legitmate excuse to shoot US hardware for meddling in domestic Chinese civil war card, it's simply too good to squander right now. Now ultimately international law doesn't matter in WW3, but it helps to have legimate reason to start a constrained WW3 in a way that would cause third parties to sit out (why meddle in ongoing Chinese civil war) and ask why not be net winners while US and PRC and most of east asia "lose". Ultimately for PRC it shouldn't be enough for them to gain TW, but US must also lose east asia.
Ukraine could easily be protect if there was a will to do so in the West. Very few people want to go die fighting for a country they can't even point to on a map so the the most effective solution to defending Ukraine is off the table.
Not sure about "easily" but I believe the idea at this point is to not escalate, drag out the war and win on economic grounds. Of course dragging things out also comes at a huge price for Ukraine but the EU/US seem to have accepted that as the price to be paid despite the moral posturing.
This is definitely not the sort of "protection" I would rely on.
On the flip side though see how badly things are working out for Russia. I think EU will not do business with Russia for a generation. Russia is really fucked.
PRC sees the writing on the wall and, being the pragmatic bunch that they are, will probably not invade Taiwan. Unless Xi really controls the country 100% (this I do not know since I am not a Chinese observer) and goes crazy like Putin did.
I agree that it is just dragging on and that is what I meant by describing the alternative as easy. Sending money and weapons is just leading to more death and destruction and no victory for Ukraine.
I don't think Ukraine can win with the way things are going unless the West joins the fighting or Russia collapses. Waiting until Russia collapses will quite possibly be a long time which will result in a Pyrrhic victory for Ukraine. They will have an entire generation of dead men at the rate things are going.
PRC never advertised a timeline outside of implying national rejuvenation (which can't happen without reincorporating TW) by PLA centennial by 2049. If you depend on western propaganda like Davidson Window 2027 then you can keep thumb twiddling. What's likely going to happen is some inciting event or some engineered out of blue casus belli.
PRC doesn't have any capable enemies in the west, including US, that can prevent PRC from turning TW into a Gaza. Which PRC can do with purely mainland based fires at this point. The force balance is too lopsided off PRC shores now. PRC's fleet of PL191 can basically level all of Taiwan urban areas in a few months, weeks considering other munition stockpiles. They can build a few hundred more chasis and frankyl TW->Gaza would take a couple weeks. Otherwise every inch of TW is within a few minute strikes from mainland, so resupply is out of question. There's nothing preventing TW from becoming Gaza except Xi is kind of nice bro.
"Xi is kind of nice bro." - hopefully you are sarcastic. Xi is definitely not a nice bro.
To your narrow point of view focused on military destruction - there are other ways the West will counter a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
If China does attack Taiwan, China will be the second biggest loser.
He's nice enough all things considered, nelson mandella kind of person in LKW words. It is statistically remarkable how dovish he has been given size of PRC military now, all historic hegemons even local were up to more violence by this stage of rise.
There really aren't anything substantial, nothing the west can sustain anymore let alone in 5/10 years or 2049. It may very well be PRC is poised to be the least biggest loser, aka relative winner. IMO we're in stage where the longer PRC waits and accumulates the harder they win and frankly there's shit all west is able to do about it (on procurement side over next 10-20 years) with gap extending in PRC favor.
I personally would like to see East Asia more unified and less reliant on an increasingly unstable country like the US. They will collectively have to rely on foreigners more in the future anyway due to low birth rates as Japan already does. A lot of people serving food were Chinese when I went there. About 50% of the tourists were also Chinese.
I think the sentiment is nice but historic greviences still strong. Utlimately the problem isn't more or less reliance on US security hedging but force balance being so lopsidded in PRC that US don't matter. Reminder TW use to have the largest airforce in East Asia. At somepoint (that we're probably well past), US not capable of east asia security gurantee. And whatever you think about recent PRC/JP tussle, and ignore takaichi picking fights with RU over sakahlin and SKR over dokodo within last few weeks, JP having maritime/territorial disputes with all her neighbours despite beign loser of WW2, where her borders should be prescribed by treaty, is going to lead to messy situations.
Would love to see X's "account based in" for this thread to assess bias.
/pol/ has entered the chat.
What happened to one country, two systems?
Recommended reading on that: One Country, Two Systems in Crisis: Hong Kong's Transformation - Wong, Yiu-chung (2004)
In summary, since 1997 it has for all intents and purposes been abandoned.
That was always meant to be transitional. Also, as China marches forward, Hong Kong loses its leverage over Beijing. Now it's just one of a dozen HK-like cities for China. It went from "little prince" to "problem child".
Certainly a factor: IIRC Hong Kong's GDP versus the mainland has gone from 20-30% to 2-3% in the ~28 years since the handover, as the mainland has modernized.
While that still puts in the ballpark of "top 5 cities", it's not quite the same (relative) prize as before.
Might makes right, as always was.
We all knew it was a lie from day one.
I'm pretty sure China considers that as "signing under duress" and therefor invalid.
The relevant points on the timeline, from China's perspective, are:
China: Stop selling opium in our country. UK: How about no? China: We're kicking out your drug dealers. UK: How about an Opium War? China: Oh crap, you have way more guns. We surrender. UK: OK We're taking HK for 100 years. China: I guess we don't have any say in the matter....
A few years later... China: We get HK back now, right? UK: Yeah but we've altered the terms. Take it or leave it. China: OK. I guess.
A few years later... China: Now we have more guns so here are the new terms. Take it or leave. UK: But our deal!!
Hong Kong was actually ceeded forever. Only the second treaty for New Territories was for 99 years.
There was no "take it or leave it" there was a negociated solution to protect the people of Hong Kong because with population growth it was hard to provide a good water supply.
If the CCP had not insisted otherwise the British would have made Hong Kong a full democracy as they wanted to. As a compromise 1 country 2 systems was agreed.
The CCP just cannot be trusted to ever abide by any treaty.
Don't do deals with non-democratic rulers, they can't be held accountable by even their own populations.
A sovereign can change it's mind. It's the whole point of being sovereign.
Not saying I like what they did (I don't).
This was a joint agreement between two sovereigns. You’re correct to say that it’s within the power of a sovereign to reneg on their word, but it’s a violation of international law and the UK would have every right as a sovereign itself to seek redress through whatever means it deems appropriate.
Except they had an agreement for 50 years to keep it that way. So basically what you mean is anyone can change their mind, which means agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
Then why would anyone agree to anything?
> Agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
Pretty much. They are only as effective as the body trying to enforce it. The entire point of being a sovereign nation is nobody can force you to do anything. Now it is in a nation's self interest to not violate agreements and get along nicely, but sometimes the calculus changes and the punishment may not outweigh the benefits.
Because the British didn’t have much of a choice.
It would have been better for Hong Kongers if they’d kept it, but alas here we are.
I don't really like what China did with Hong Kong, but some things you surely agree transcend 'contracts' or normative behavior. I can't, for example, agree to be murdered in exchange for money. I might also lie to protect my children from the local murderer, or in any other case where I'd consider the outcomes 'extereme'.
Sovereigns can withdraw from agreements. It's the whole point.
The only thing you can do about it is shaming them, sanctioning them, going to war if you really care, ...
And importantly, not agree to future agreements. Outside of war, that's the ultimate punishment.
"Pray I do not alter it further."
(some obscure movie quote, probably Mark Twain or Lincoln)
The agreement was BS imposed by their colonizer. Why would anyone bother to abide by such terms when there are zero consequences for canceling them?
they came up with that phrase to put the british at ease
PRC finally enforced it. HK had high degree of autonomy (not full autonomy), and high degreed their way to not implement national security law for 20 years leading to compadrors like Lai to exist (incidentally also the largest CIA base in Asia was in HK). Imagine a region in your country with zero national security ordinance for 20 years during geopolitical competition while nativist/traitors (I'm sorry democracy activists) shake hands with Mike Pompeo lol. TLDR traitors fucked around and found out and now we finally have sustainable 1C2S.
What you are stating is exactly the viewpoint of the CCP (or any other authoritarian governments).
Everyone who advocates for basic human rights, as written in the UN's basic human rights charter, is considered a traitor, a threat to national "security", or a terrorist. They want absolutely obedient people who don't know about their own rights.
No, literally no soverign country would allow a region to operate without national security umbrella for decades, PRC was retardly patient, magnanoumous so to let HK fuck around for so long. The fact is nativist HKers tried to carve a NSL state of exception and they correctly got their shit kicked in once PRC ran out of patience. Human rights > national security is frankly absurdly unserious position to take. It's historically more normal to throw HK into the torment nexus than to have it exist without NSL coverage, that's level of security vacuum is functionally fail state behavior.
UN particapation is indeed varying level of compardour behavior, but also frequently not since you know even independant raprateurs go through filtering process frequently supported to host country to represent their geopolitical interests.
What is obviously traitorous, is shaking hands with ex head of CIA, we lie we cheat we steal Pompeo, during ongoing Sino-US geopolitical cold war, while advocating for sanctions on your own people. That's not obedience, that's treason. Like even fucking obedient people know having the right to commit treason, which Lai did, is retarded. A position an unforutnate amount of retarded HKers took to heart and frankly need to be reeducated out of.
> No, literally no soverign country would allow a region to operate without national security umbrella for decades...
In other "normal" sovereign countries, the "national security umbrella" is defined by representatives voted by the people. Suspected violators are prosecuted by a fair court, with a jury determining the validity of the charges. I don't think either of those is the case for Hong Kong.
> Human rights > national security is frankly absurdly unserious position to take.
Again, in any state with decent democracy, the law states otherwise. A nation is formed to protect the rights of its people, not to take those rights away.
> What is obviously traitorous, is shaking hands with ex head of CIA, we lie we cheat we steal Pompeo, during ongoing Sino-US geopolitical cold war, while advocating for sanctions on your own people. That's not obedience, that's treason.
That is rarely considered a national security case in any decent democratic country. He was actually exercising his freedom of speech, as defined in the UN's basic human rights charter I mentioned earlier. Limiting which political viewpoints are "allowed" is a classical, textbook example of authoritarianism.
List one normal decent democracy without NSL law. You will find the answer is none. There's a jury in some HK NSL law (for low level protestor), people got off for light greviances in the past despite Beijing protest. Lai gettign 3 judge speedrun because he's simply an obvious comprador traitor.
And let's not forget this NSL dalying was an failure of HK making, i.e. basically failed state behavior that HK incompetence generated. Frankly that's demonstration HK isn't ready for democracy at all.
And no a national is formed to sustain the nation, eitherway you can't protect people without NSL... and btw that's what PRC did, protect 1400m people from HK traitors by closing their treason lifehack loophole. It's basic statecraft.
Yes and trading secrets and espionage with geopolitical adversary is muh freedom of speech and not espionage. Again unserious, exactly why HK needs to be reeducated. You're conflating disset (speech) with collusion (treason), Lai colluded, which is unprotected speech anywhere.
I can't tell if this is an advocate for Chinese dictatorship or simply a terminally online foreign policy expert hobbyist. The grammar is signature pol/ncd.
Can't I be both. This just primarily PRC geopolitics shitpost account (because ppl get wierdly stalkery if I talk PRC geopolitics on main account) along with some lifting. The lack of grammar and care is because talking about geopolitics online doesn't warrant higher effort.
Regardess above comment isn't even about PRC system. It's about how HKers and their supporters who thinks it's reasonable for city of 7m to have no NSL coverage while serving as intelligence hub for PRC geopolitical adversaries is delulu and unserious position. Anyone rubbing 2 brain cells together should understand how anomlous and not sustainable that arrangement was, and indeed it was never suppose to be that way if not for sheer HK arrogance to skirt NSL implementation requirements and PRC patience.
Mr. Lai is the real deal. He started out as a child laborer and worked his way up from nothing to owning a clothing brand and then Apple Daily pro-democracy publisher. He had the option to leave Hong Kong, but stayed and kept up the fight.
He's facing life in prison right now, so this conviction puts everything on the line.
Glad to see this hitting the front page. I posted an article earlier with not much movement which was really worrying for the HK free thought movement; happy that this turned out to not be the case.
I did some consulting for Jimmy at Apple Daily, and he took me out to the best street-food lunches I ever had. His car took us to a busy street corner, where four of us had a huge lunch for two hours while the car disappeared. When the car magically showed up at the end, Jimmy told me that he paid ~$20 for that amazing food for all of us. No pretense. A lovely man. Very sad.
Alexei Navalny’s death, leaving behind his wife and two children, showed the harsh reality that martyrdom isn't always worth it. Sacrifice is not always rewarded. Sometimes the tyrants win. Unless you believe in karma or divine retribution.
Well it’s not martyrdom if you aren’t sacrificing and we don’t know the true outcome of Russia soon after his death.
Do you think, were you to talk to Alexei now, you could convince him that his life fighting dictatorship wasn’t worth it?
I think Navalny was counting on the Russian people to respond strongly. Unfortunately after his death, everything carried on as normal. Western governments continue to be a soft touch and buy oil from Russia. I'm not sure he would still give his life after seeing how the world failed him.
Depends on what price you have to pay in order to avoid martyrdom. Who are you willing to become in order to live?
The US is currently expelling students, firing professors and college presidents and so on, not because they aren't US aligned, but because they allow people on campus to criticize Israel.
CBS just got taken over by the same cabal.
Amidst ICE grabbing people out of Home Depot parking lots in the US, China is just doing the same thing over there.
One can care about both
ICE doesn't grab citizens out of Home Depot parking lots.
It looks like they may be doing so.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-15/home-dep...
No one in that article was a US citizen.
The emphasis on "citizen" was not clear in my original comment. The OP I was replying to did not make this distinction clear with "expelling students".
teacher from daycare so far was pretty much the "best"
Dictatorship of the proletariat jails a member of the bourgeoisie notable for calling for the restoration of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and conspiring with agents of bourgeois states to that end. This doesn't seem surprising? A revolutionary state working to prevent counterrevolution?
Imagine a major city in America that were politically dominated y China for 50+ years and it is hard to imagine this type of blowback not occuring eventually.
What are U.S. citizens thinking when they are confronted with violent movements on Capitol Hill?
The same applies to Hong Kong.
Is it possible to get a fair and just trial in China? I have trouble accepting this or any verdict from a Chinese court and would appreciate examples that counter this.
Of course it's possible to get a fair and just trial in China, since that can happen even coincidentally to the process. E.g. I'm sure an actual murderer has been given a just punishment in China, at some point in the history of the Chinese legal system.
Is it possible to get a fair trial if you're an enemy of the state? Well... what defines fair and just? In accordance with the will of the Chinese people? Or are we talking about Western standards?
> In accordance with the will of the Chinese people?
Since when did the Chinese people get a say? There is no way for them to express their "will" without overthrowing the communists. It's the will of Xi and that's it.
>Or are we talking about Western standards?
Like USA-standards, or past-Western standards. Currently USA's law is 'did you pay the president a bribe to be pardoned'. CCP looks positively enlightened compared to that.
> Is it possible to get a fair trial if you're an enemy of the state?
In which country is it possible to get a fair trial if you're an enemy of the state, especially in today's climate?
Well it's possible in the same coincidental sense that I described, right? You can be railroaded _and_ be guilty of horrific crimes. It depends whether fairness and justness are properties of the process or the outcome.
Regardless, it's presumably all relative. At least there's certainly an ordering of states I'd rather have against me, as a person living in them. Maybe Sweden?
I think if it's coincidental, it cannot be fair right? Fair in the sense we're discussing here must mean a repeatable system. If a wrongful process arrives at the right conclusion, it's still not fair (e.g. let's say a bunch of people lynch someone accused of murdering a child, without hearing any evidence, and it turns out the suspect was really a child mudered: was the process "fair"?).
Or if you don't like the child murder analogy: suppose an FBI employee decided to betray the US to the Soviets out of money, not ideology (cue Robert Hanssen). The US is at this point in time still executing traitors to the state. They grab this Hanssen-type, send him to the electric chair (on faulty evidence or simply "vibes" of guilt), but later it turns out this person was really guilty. Was this process fair?
Maybe Sweden if relatively fairer, like you said. I suspect not. But even if it was relatively fair, what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?
It's possible for a meat grinder process to still be good at convicting, say, all murderers, at the cost of a few false positives. In a utilitarian sense that could be considered reasonable. And it might well be repeatable in a way. Even default-guilty is repeatable, and 'just' on those terms, as long as your pre-charging pipeline isn't kicking up too many false positives.
Really it's just about the definition of fairness or justness though. I'm not really disagreeing because I'm not putting forward definitions of my own either, but a lot of the comments here throw out the terms with some assumed meaning. For example, I'm pretty sure if you polled Chinese people, they wouldn't have a problem with the OP story's outcome. So does that make it democratic? Or good as a point of public policy? It's all a bit hand-wavey without specifying.
> what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?
Well we (I'm assuming) both live in the West and so we encounter the exceptionalist narrative of this place. Certainly HN is a Western forum. Most views of China held by people in the West are based on partial truths and thought-terminating cliches.
But that's kind of just how _people_ are the world over, no? Chinese people in Chinese forums have a parallel experience to this, just mirrored.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think we're in agreement.
I too think the situation is probably mirrored from China's side. I hope there are some people over there who can also understand there's some middle ground, that neither side is totally right or wrong, and that we both perceive the world in half-truths and thought-terminating cliches.
And yes, because I live in the West (well, Latin America, anyway) I'm more upset about the distortions from "our" side. I don't really get to witness the Chinese side. I'm very skeptical even of what "our" side claims the distortions on the Chinese side are, since I don't get to witness them directly and I have reason to be skeptical of my side's narrative.
To some extent, Somalia. They have a 'xeer' system which is by design independent of the government and works as essentially a peer-to-peer justice system but with a fairly common set of 'law' throughout the country. It works through a process of decentralized judges which are appealable through inter-tribal courts ensuring the process is largely divorced from both the government and any one tribe.
There have been a few cases of Somalis for example even killing government police/military and them being found not guilty in xeer court and even the government respected the decision.
Do you have some test for fairness or justice?
The best measure I can think of is per capita prison population. It's not great because it doesn't directly address fairness but it's likely related.
Two countries, with roughly the same "fairness" of courts, should, ceteris paribus, have roughly the same per-capita prison population. By that measure, China would be slightly on the fairer end 92nd lowest out of 224.
I don't remember if HK does the same thing but China divides their police into two groups. The more common type are basically public safety officers. They are unarmed but I saw a few places where the had plastic riot shields and catch poles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_catcher#/media/File:Mancat... The armed police are only called out as needed.
The airport had a two of military guys standing at attention with rifles. They looked like a couple of wax figures until I saw them do a formal changing of the guard.
I don't know if anyone has assembled data on actual court records. How often are police charges prosecuted? How often do they go to trial? What percentage end up getting convictions? What are the average sentences?
It would also be good to decide what we're comparing it to. A rich white person in the US can expect a very different level of fairness than a poor black person. Is a random Chinese person's experience more like the rich white persons' or the poor black person's?
"Is it possible to get a fair and just trial in China?"
What makes you ask a such question? Here are some bad ideas which comes to my mind:
* you think China is inferior?
* or maybe Chinese are inferior?
* maybe you think they always lie?
* or maybe they don't have laws?
* maybe plain old racism?
Forgive me, but your question sounds so bad. Counter question, did any of war criminals get a fair trial in the USA? (I am not listing countries they did war crimes, because there are too many)
> What makes you ask a such question?
Obviously, it is that a political opponent of the administration is facing life in prison seemingly for being an outspoken critic of the administration.
Calling on other nations to harm your country is generally considered treason in any country.
If you own a newspaper and use that platform to make such a request, you're likely to attract a law enforcement response wherever you are.
He isn't a political opponent, he isn't a politician. He met with high-ranking officials of a foreign nation and lobbied them to take action that he believed would harm China and lead to a change in government.
I also wouldn't call him outspoken critic either. For obvious reasons, the main one being a level of economic development unknown in human history, there isn't very much to criticize outside of politics. His gripe is solely political in that he believes that a different system of government is required (one assumes with more input from people like himself, again though he isn't a politician and, afaik, has no real political positions apart from supporting Trump and NY Post-style sensationalism/xenophobia, iirc they created a meme depicting mainlanders as locusts...it is quite funny to see people who, I can only assume, are not massive fans of Trump cream themselves over the Chinese equivalent).
Is the US currently running massive concentration camps? Is the US currently involved in large scale organ harvesting?
> Is the US currently running massive concentration camps?
https://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities
China isn't running massive concentration camps, nor is it involved in large scale organ harvesting.
Hong Kong is dead.
Yeah, sure, there's still a city there with that name. But the Hong Kong we knew is dead. What made Hong Kong what it was is dead.
The purpose of Hong Kong globally, a port for trade with the closed off China, has been dead for a long time.
This is sad to read as someone who only recently started appreciating Wong Kar Wai films and wants to visit. Although I have been reading about the speech/thought suppression and creative exodus for a long time.
Hong Kong the liberal democracy, that you think you knew, never existed. Most in HK will tell you that that have more freedom under China than they ever had under the British
In 1967 the Chinese people in Hong Kong were fighting against the English, English officers killed dozens of Chinese to retain their control on their "democracy". A city they had violently seized decades earlier to push opium and heroin on Chibese people, against the Chinese authorities wishes.
Now white, professional westerners who lost control of China weep and gnash about their supposed moral superiority over China.
Hong Kong is the only business friendly place in the world that’s genuinely independent of the US/EU transatlantic regulatory blob.
The mainland government want to keep it prosperous so will likely work to protect it from sanctions or international regulations.
If you’re a Russian oligarch it’s probably safer to keep your money in HK than Cayman or Switzerland these days. Even if you’re a petrostate sovereign wealth fund or non NATO central bank there’s some value in holding assets that can’t be frozen at will by the US treasury secretary.
You could argue that Signapaore and the UAE compete here but they have much more dependency on the west for security and diplomacy.
Well now it's dependent on the Chinese regulatory blob which I would argue is worse.
The EU is still debating after 3 years of war in Ukraine and weekly nuclear threats what to do with the Russian funds, let's be real, with the same situation in HK, the funds would have been seized within a week.
Not doubting but genuinely curious - what type of situation are you alluding to in which China would freeze a foreign nations funds in HK?
Well, recognizing Taiwan as an independent country for starters. The countries that recognize Taiwan are not recognized as independent states by China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_T...
Remember, Hong Kong was supposed to be in a 50 year transition period from 1997 where there were supposed to be one country, two systems [1]. The national security legislation is just one in a long line of failures [2]. If nothing else was learned, it was this: China, specifically the CCP, cannot be trusted.
It makes me sick that the UK sends billions to Ukraine to interfere in a war we have no fundamental right to involve ourselves in, meanwhile, Hong Kong was allowed to fall with only light media coverage. It is outrageous. The politicians that oversaw it should be ashamed.
Not to mention that Carrie Lam, former leader of Hong Kong, sold her people up the river by allowing the national security law in [3]. She was even hiding out in the UK with her husband from her own countrymen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_country,_two_systems#Imple...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_country,_two_systems#2020_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Lam
Hong Kong Basic Law also required a national security law since 1997. Lets not be selective.
> Article 23 is an article of the Hong Kong Basic Law. It states that Hong Kong "shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies."
Don't worry, China is learning a lot from Russia. Taiwan is next.
The only lesson that China can learn from Russia is to not invade their neighbor. It did not work out at all for Russia; if China invades Taiwan it will not work out for them either.
As a non-us observer, I'm unsure where this "China gonna invade Taiwan" hysteric come from. It never made sense.
From China insisting that the two lands will be united no matter what while building weapons aimed at Taiwan and systems that will be very effective at shooting at Taiwan and building literal invasion barges that are only usable at invading little islands that have heavily built up the defenses on their beaches.
Gee, I wonder where it comes from
There’s no way China is going to be an aggressor. It’s more akin to “don’t come into my lawn or else”. If you don’t go into their lawn nothing happens.
Probably from China's claims that Taiwan is part of China.
They'll say the same thing about Taiwan. And do the same thing.
Um, at the time of the National Security Legislation (your reference [2]), we were not sending billions to Ukraine, because Russia hadn't started their open attack yet.
In 2019, NPR's planet money did a segment on the Hong Kong protests that heavily featured Jimmy Lai. This segment from the end has always stuck with me.
GOLDSTEIN: China has not allowed more freedom of speech. Publications can still be shut down for criticizing the government. And yet, China has gotten richer. It started to develop its own financial center in Shanghai. Foreign money can now flow into China without going through Hong Kong, so the Chinese Communist Party doesn't need Hong Kong as much as it used to.
This has led to more and more tension between people in Hong Kong and the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government. In 2014, there was a fight over how to choose the government official who runs Hong Kong, and a million people in Hong Kong took to the streets to protest. Just last month, the government official who runs Hong Kong wanted to pass a new law that would allow people in Hong Kong to be extradited to China to stand trial. The people in Hong Kong said, we don't trust your mainland courts. Two million people protested in the streets, including, by the way, Jimmy Lai, who is now in his 70s.
What was it like? What was it like walking that day?
LAI: I was very excited - when you see so many people, you know, is fighting for a moral issue. We don't have guns. We don't have tanks. We don't have anything. The only thing we have the Chinese government don't is the moral authority we have, the moral courage we have.
GOLDSTEIN: The moral authority and courage, yeah.
LAI: Yes.
GOLDSTEIN: A few weeks later, on July 1, on the anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, protesters broke into the Hong Kong legislature buildings, smashed glass walls and spray-painted graffiti. Chinese leaders see these protesters and Jimmy Lai, for that matter, as agents for foreign influence - as, you know, basically latter-day colonialists. His house has been firebombed, and there was an assassination plot against him.
LAI: I stopped thinking about this because if I let the fear frighten me, I cannot go on, you know, because with what I have taken up, I have to sustain it. I will be the last to leave. That is like a captain who cannot jump the ship.
GOLDSTEIN: I mean, you're rich. You could leave if you wanted.
LAI: Yeah. If I'm rich but an a*hole...
GOLDSTEIN: (Laughter).
LAI: ...What my kids will think about me?
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah.
LAI: You know, being rich, you can be very poor...
GOLDSTEIN: Go on. Say more.
LAI: ...Because if you only have money, you lost the meaning, you lost the dignity, you lost everything as a human being. What else do you have?
Seems like a pretty genuine guy, thanks for sharing.
Haven't followed this 'geo area' that much, so don't know the guy, but this last part reminds me of Musk.
Just remember when the press reports on foreign affairs, “pro democracy” means “pro capitalism, pro west” we don’t gaf about democracy or self determination. That’s why we ally with saudi arabia, israel, and invaded iraq.
I understand what you are trying to say and as much as I disagree with Israel, it is a democracy. We invaded Iraq for terrible reasons but it wasn't a "democracy" we were invading.
With regards to Israel, how can you have a democracy when more than half the population in palestine is under military rule and there is an addition to the basic law as of 2018 that israel is a jewish state and settlement is explicitly encouraged? It is an explicit apartheid regime committing a fascist genocide in the service of expansion.
Democracy for whom? Democracy to what end?
With respect to Iraq, it is true there was not a democracy there, but we did violate their self determination and installing an american viceroy is the opposite of democracy. Iraq had a welfare state that helped many citizens even if there were many features of the government I despise, but we destroyed it all and turned it into an experimental playground for American privatization efforts.
Iraq today is a self-governing parliamentary democracy and the US has had no direct say in their governance since the first parliament was seated in 2006. That the interim government installed by the US was not democratically elected doesn’t say all that much, especially given the country was in a state of civil war immediately following the removal of Saddam from power.
Democracy is a tool, and any tool can be used for good and bad. By good, that means for us full equlity, including self determination.
As an Assyrians, my nation suffered greatly under the old and the new regime, and will most certainly be eradicated.
Democracy didn't stop my assyrians from being taught Arabs and Kurds came to civilize, it didn't stop endless settlement of Arabs and Kurds, it certainty didn't stop the death threats, and most certianly didn't give us a voice that we could use, and it didn't help my nation from being forced to flee even in times of peace(like today).
After all my nation never chose to be part of said Iraq(or Turkey) and by extension it didn't chose to be part of said democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_independence_movement
Whatever else they are, Israel is a democracy.
Can an apartheid state really be considered a democracy?
Israel has 2 million Arab citizens with full voting rights, free education, free healthcare, and representation in the Knesset.
Sure, within the Green Line, the minority of Arabs who managed to avoid being expelled in 1948 are now citizens with equal legal rights, at least in theory. So it’s reasonable to argue that there is no apartheid regime there.
But that has nothing to do with the West Bank, which is where the accusation of apartheid is most credible.
This is, of course, why pro-Israel advocates always attempt to redirect the conversation to focus specifically on the Arab citizens of Israel within the Green Line when these matters are discussed.
Thank you for acknowledging that 2 million Arabs live in Israel with full citizenship and rights. That undermines the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
As for the West Bank, it's ruled by Fatah, not Israel. Israel provides for its own citizens -- regardless of ethnicity -- but it's not responsible for the citizens of foreign territories and their governments. Israel is under no obligation to provide services to foreign governments, especially those compromised by antisemitic terrorist organizations.
> As for the West Bank, it's ruled by Fatah
You've repeated this claim a few times in the thread, so sorry if this is repetitive, but just to recap:
1. Fatah is not allowed to build an airport in Palestinian territory -- the Israeli military controls its airspace.
2. Fatah is not able to determine who comes in and out of the territory -- Israel controls both its border with Israel (which I suppose is reasonable) and its border with Jordan (which is not).
3. Fatah does not control the population registry or decide who can receive a Palestinian ID card -- Israel does.
4. Fatah does not have a monopoly over the use of military force in the West Bank -- the Israeli military can (and does) operate wherever it wants to within the territory.
5. Fatah does not control who can move where within the West Bank -- there are many Israeli-only settlements and Israeli-only roads, with access controlled by the Israeli military and police. Even when moving between Palestinian areas, residents are often subject to Israeli checkpoints (with long lines).
Is Fatah allowed to control some civil matters, e.g. the education system? Sure.
I will let others reading this be the judge of whether this constitutes "Fatah control" or "Israeli control". To me, the answer is clear.
> Israel is under no obligation to provide services to foreign governments, especially those compromised by antisemitic terrorist organizations.
Obviously. Nobody is complaining, for example, that Israel doesn't provide services to Iranians or Syrians or Yemenis. Those are legitimately foreign countries that Israel doesn't control.
...
Taking a look at the rest of the thread, it seems that, having had no success justifying your ludicrous position that "Israel doesn't control the West Bank", you've instead pivoted to explaining how the fact that they control it is Palestinians' fault, or at least justifiable due to Israel's legitimate interest in preventing terrorism.
Well, which is it? Does Fatah control the West Bank, or does Israel control it but the occupation is justified?
There's a lot I could say about this topic, too, but I don't think I'll bother. Galloping from one canned talking point to the next faster than the points can be refuted is not a good-faith debating style and a waste of time to engage with.
Israel is not a democracy. You cannot call yourself a democracy when 5 million people live under your military occupation and are subject to military law without any political representation. An apartheid state cannot be a democracy.
The State of Israel controls certain territory which it administers democratically. It controls other territory in which only people of a particular ethnic/cultural group are citizens and everyone else is stateless and governed by military law. Conveniently, the latter territory is considered “not part of Israel” despite having been fully controlled by the state for many decades.
So, is Israel a democracy? I guess that depends on your definition of “democracy”, and also your definition of “Israel”.
> "It controls other territory in which only people of a particular ethnic/cultural group are citizens and everyone else is stateless and governed by military law."
This is simply not true. There are over 2 million Arab citizens in Israel, a full 21% of Israel's population. Another 4% are Bedouin.
You’re ignoring 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and 2 million in the Gaza Strip who are forced to live under Israel’s military occupation and law but do not have political representation in its government. That’s not even getting into discriminatory practices in Israel against its own Arab citizens. How about the fact that a Jew anywhere in the world can immigrate to Israel, but a Palestinian Arab whose family was forced out in the Nakba, with a valid claim to land in Israel, cannot.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005[0], evacuating every Jewish citizen and dismantling homes and synagogues. Today, there are zero Jews living in Gaza.
Gaza is run by Hamas and the West Bank by Fatah. Israel does not "control [that] territory" it does not block "other particular ethnic/cultural groups from becoming citizens", nor does it "govern [it] by military law." Israel does not govern or occupy either territory.
[0]: https://www.britannica.com/event/Israels-disengagement-from-...
The West Bank is administered by the Israeli Civil Administration which is a branch of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Even the Israeli High Court of Justice (Supreme Court) says that "Israel holds the Area in belligerent occupation" and that "a military administration... continues to apply". [0]
Not to mention how the Israeli government allows over 700,000 illegal settlers to flood the West Bank and does absolutely nothing to stop them from stealing land or attacking Palestinians. The Israeli military has ultimate authority there. Like the other commenter said, it's a fantasy to claim otherwise.
[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=B1ZIIDeEc5AC&pg=PA511#v=on...
Israel does have a military presence in the West Bank due to the monthly terrorist attacks on Jewish citizens in the West Bank and Israel, currently at 57 attacks per month this year.
As for settlers, I ask readers to observe the double standard: Jews who live in Palestinian areas are "illegal settlers" and "stealing land", but Arabs who live in Israel are entitled to free education, healthcare, citizenship, voting rights, and representation in the government.
Why the double standard?
By "Arabs who live in Israel" you mean the minority of Arabs who the Israelis didn't force out at gunpoint during Plan Dalet and the Nakba. The Israelis can rectify the situation at any time by either allowing the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to have a real state, not a puppet or rump state, or by incorporating them into Israel with full legal rights, political representation, and an end to military occupation.
Ah, the "Nakba", the catastrophe: the 1948 war where Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Islamic Holy War Army invaded Israel, despite being legally partitioned by the United Nations.
Yes, what a catastrophe that invasion was for Arab nations and Arab population in the land.
Perhaps if those nations had not invaded Israel, and perhaps if local Arab communities had not committed violence and massacres of local Jewish communities leading up to Jewish independence in 1948, things could have turned out better for them.
And maybe things can be different tomorrow, too, if Palestinians turn away from terrorism and seeking the destruction of the world's only Jewish homeland.
As for Gaza, it's ridiculous to say that Israel doesn't occupy it when even long before October 2023 the Israelis have imposed a complete blockade on the territory. They control the movement of goods, they control the water supply, the power supply, the airspace, they built a 20-foot wall around it, they destroyed the only airport, they control how far fishing boats can go out, and on and on. How is that not military control?
The claim that Israel doesn’t control the West Bank is utter fantasy. Yes, they allow a Palestinian civil administration to handle some of the work of governing, however it operates entirely under the ultimate authority of the Israeli military.
Btw, how many Palestinians are studying at Ari’el University in the West Bank?
Perhaps there would be more freedom and self-determination for the West Bank if the Fatah government redirected spending its resources from terrorism to infrastructure and services for its people?
In 2023, there were 214 terrorist attacks per month. Israel instituted more security checkpoints, which has resulted in a decline to 57 attacks/month this year.
And yet, 57 attacks per month still ridiculously high. What nation would tolerate that? Is it any wonder that there are security restrictions in place?
As for Ariel University, it is within a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, so Palestinians are generally opposed to its existence. (And indeed, opposed to the existence of Jews in the West Bank, which is a true form of racism and apartheid.) And yet, Ariel University does have a minority of Arab students among the Jewish majority.
Funny how you were originally arguing that Israel doesn't control the West Bank, but now you say "perhaps there would be more freedom and self-determination for the West Bank", correctly suggesting that there isn't self-determination now. So Israel does control it.
Fatah does rule the West Bank. That Israel has security checkpoints only reinforces the reality that Palestinian self-determination is undermined primarily not by Israel, but by its own violence against Jews.
If there weren't some 50 terror attacks per month coming out of the West Bank, Israel wouldn't have need for security checkpoints. If Hamas didn't invade Israel on October 7th 2023, Israel would have zero military presence in the strip like they did for 20 years prior.
Pro-Palestinian folks need to stop blaming the Jewish boogey man for Palestinian problems and start looking at the violence and hatred of Jews within their own camp.
Those live in the territory that is administered democratically, i.e., not the West Bank.
I’m not sure if you even read my comment, but you certainly didn’t understand it.
Israel doesn't administer the West Bank; Fatah does.
OK, tell me how I can visit Ramallah without passing through Israeli checkpoints. I’m willing to go through the border with Jordan, or fly into Ramallah airport, and pass through Fatah customs. Surely that should be possible if Israel doesn’t administer the territory?
Sure. Just tell me how Israel should prevent the hundreds of terrorist attacks per month coming from the West Bank. There were 214 terrorist attacks per month in 2023, now down to 57/month today; thanks primarily to new security checkpoints.
Perhaps if Fatah would redirect its funding away from terrorism, there would be fewer security checkpoints and more self-determination for its people.
"pro-democracy" is code for agent/operative of a colonial power. It's why so many hong kong pro-"democracy" operatives fled to britain, germany, us, etc. And it's also why so may pro-"democracy" operatives end up in countries we have problems with. No pro-"democracy" operatives in allied countries like saudi arabia, qatar, etc. Strange.
> The law was enacted without consulting the Hong Kong legislature
And a plain reading of the Basic Law (Hong Kong's constitution) permits everything that's happened, and expecting the contrary seems like a coping mechanism. There are massive exemptions for Hong Kong's autonomy and deferrence to Beijing at Beijing's discretion, or by the Head of Hong Kong who is appointed by Beijing
I wasn't around for the handover so I'm largely exempt from the emotional marriage to an ideal Hong Kong residents and people affirming Hong Kong resident's feelings seem to have
The legislature wouldn't have to be consulted for the National Security Law to have been enacted, the article and seemingly all of the west seems to think that is a controversy when it isn't necessary
And then there is another layer where the structure of the legislature doesn't even match western ideals and wouldn't have made a difference. The legislature is 50% popular vote and 50% corporations. So even if 100% of the population voted for the same thing, they would only have 50% of the vote, and the corporations are all pro-Beijing by nature of being able to economically exist in that environment.
(Notably, the ancient City of London within London functions nearly the same way. Actually in an even more egregious way with the non-natural persons having a more extreme weighting of votes)
People act like a different founding document governs Hong Kong (Sino British joint declaration? Some comments by representatives), when it doesn't. People act like the governing document of Hong Kong was supposed to be ignored for 50 years, when something way different and way more integrated is supposed to happen at the end of the handover period.
I think there is zero path to the goals Hong Kong residents espouse and are used to. They’re imagining a different governing system than the one they live in, thats incompatible.
> there is zero path to the goals Hong Kong residents espouse and are used to
From talking to friends and relatives from HK I've seen huge diversity in how people think about HK, China, their relationship with each other, Mandarin, Cantonese, food, and "the West".
There are certainly large groups of HKers who would prefer for HK to seced from China. There are also many HKers who love the UK and mourn the loss of HK to China.
There are also huge swathes of the population that chaffed at being colonized. Long time residents can show you the old police barracks where British troops would beat the locals in black bag operations. They'll tell you about how the feng shui of the Bank of China Tower lead to the collapse of the British empire. They'll tell you that they spent their lives paying taxes into a "democracy" they never got to vote in.
The opinions within HK are far more diverse than we make them out to be.
Exactly, which goes to my point about the absurdity of the legislative body, even if 100% of residents voted for the same thing it would only be 50% of the vote, and 100% of residents won't vote for the same thing.
The NSL (and the way it was implemented) is as stark a violation of he Sino British Joint Declaration as possible without PLA tanks on the ground.
Game over. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
but the Sino British Joint Declaration is not the constitution of Hong Kong. It is not even an enforceable treaty.
Its analogous to an American finding a piece of the Declaration of Independence to confirm their views after finding the US constitution too inconvenient. A pointless exercise, levels worse than even the Federalist papers.
this guy was sold a false idea of "democracy" - however his sponsors no longer have powers to they used to think they have. hence his sponsors have thrown "democracy" in the trash.
previously, these well funded democracy - regime agents would win in many places, but now the tables have turned - america now has a demagogue as president.